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Marvel's App On The Apple iPad Confirmed (UPDATE)

Published Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:02:07 -0500

Last updated Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:27:14 -0500

The New York Times said it, when reviewing the Apple iPad.

The Marvel comic-book app is brilliant in its vividness and panel-by-panel navigation. (Oops, maybe that app belongs in the review for techies.)

The Marvel app. Boom. Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun Times confirms it and that it's Comixology in nature.

If you're a purist who needs to see the whole page at once, you can hold the iPad in portrait mode and flip through the story as you would with a paper comic. You can zoom in and out as you wish, but though the iPad screen is smaller than a standard comic page (I measure it as 7.5", compared to a comic's 10") it's still crisp and readable when scaled down. Turn the iPad on its side, and a new viewing mode becomes available. In iBooks, tapping the left and right sides of the screen turns pages. In the Marvel app, it "moves the camera position" forward and backwards through the story, snappily zooming in and out through the "units" of the page, highlighting moments of dialogue or action.

Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing tells us

iPad native apps provided at launch such as the spectacular, game-changing Marvel Comics app (crisp, lucid art, the ability to navigate frame-by-frame, rendering spoilers down the page obsolete)

And this video from Leander Kahney at Cult Of Mac gives us a few seconds view at around 03:35

Now this still looks like the Marvel Digital and iPhone plans – books six months after publication in print, large gaps in the catalogue, only prominent titles, and free previews. But Marvel having their own app, just like they have their own Previews catalogue and had their own distributor does seem to be the Marvel preferred way of doing things…

UPDATE: You can also watch the Marvel App in use by Andy Ihnatko at around 17:50 in. And it looks fantastic.

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