A new digital venture called Stēla Comics gets off the ground Wednesday. Its mission: to create a new way to experience comics, with help from Portland's deep bench of artists and writers.
Stela's structure, offering several dozen titles for a flat monthly fee, echoes video streaming services like Netflix or Hulu Plus.
Courtesy Stela Comics
Digital comics are big business. Sales in 2014 topped $100 million dollars and that was before Amazon acquired the main online marketplace Comixology last year.
But have you ever tried reading a digital comic book? Former Dark Horse editor and Stēla recruit Jim Gibbons notes it's not bad if you download to a tablet.
"What I like to do on the tablet is keep it in the Full page view," Gibbons said. "The iPad screen is comparable enough to a comic book page that it's easy enough for me, the whole page comes up. You can read the whole page as if it were in a book in front of you, and then you swipe to the left, you get to the next page, the whole page is there."
Just try to do the same comic on your smart phone. That full page, with all its panels, can be hard to take in.
"Maybe you're turning your phone, maybe swiping," Gibbons said. "You can pinch and zoom on this. Not overly complicated, but it's a lot to figure out."
Gibbons has signed on as senior editor for Stēla. The company is developing brand new titles written and drawn to be read on a smart phone. On the beta version, it's magnificently compact. You read one panel, move down. Read another, go down some more. Most stories bounce along with bright, engaging graphics, at a pace that keeps you scrolling.
It's not hard to imagine whipping your phone out one-handed to read a few pages in the grocery line. And it's the perfect size for sneaking an undercover read after bedtime, just like you used to.
Gibbons is hiring from the pool of mobile-native artists who regularly publish comics to Tumblr — artists like Brooke Allen, who worked on the Eisner Award-winning "Lumberjanes" series, and Zack Sterling, an artist for Cartoon Network's "Adventure Time."
But Stēla is also leveraging Gibbons' connections to writers and artists who have worked on widely-read print titles — people such as Portlanders Chris Sebela, Ibrahim Moustafa and Michael Avon Oeming.
"I've always been interested in how do you get more comics into more people's hands," Oeming said. "I remember early on looking at the 'Archie' books at the checkout counters. I was like, 'Why aren't there other comic books here?'"
Oeming is young enough that he's on Tumblr, but old enough to remember the first generation of digital comics. The Internet was new in the early '90s, and everyone was scrambling.
A sample of art from Michael Avon Oeming's upcoming Stela series.
Courtesy Michael Avon Oeming
"I did a web comic called 'Dr. Cyborg' with Alan Gross — back in 1998 I think," he says. "And we were guessing then. It was based on a newspaper strip. We weren't too concerned that screen size. Because everyone had a big giant square screen."
Overall comics haven't changed much — until now. Oeming says he's excited about Stēla's concept.
"I think it's going to appeal to your stay-at-home dad, your working moms, anyone who doesn't want to pinch and zoom," he said. "It may not sound like much effort but sometimes it's just a bit of a roadblock."
We decided to take Stēla out for a test drive in a tough room.
Jason Leivian is the owner of Floating World Comics, a shop in Northwest Portland that describes itself as a store for people who still like going to stores. He scrolled through Stēla's sword and sorcery epic, "Inheritance," which was drawn by conceptual artist Kinman Chan, and isn't thrilled.
"I'd say this format is definitely better but there's still something about it. The screen is small. You don't see the full page all at once, "Leivian said. "Somehow I just lose interest. I don't know what it is."
Admittedly, he's a little preferential toward hard copy. But Leivian adds there's one thing he already likes about Stēla: its business model. The company is offering its artists upfront page rates that are competitive with what he'd get for other creator-owned titles with bigger publishers.
"Any new pub company offering a page rate up front is a good thing, no matter what format," Levian says.
Plus, it will deliver a profit split on the back end.
For consumers, the service will deliver about eight fresh pages every weekday, editor Jim Gibbons says, for an introductory rate of $4.99 a month.