Digital Comics News Round-Up
Posted by Brigid Alverson on December 14, 2023 @ 6:13 pm CT
DSTLRY launched the beta version of its desktop digital comics reader on December 6, 2024, with the anthology The Devil’s Cut as the launch title. Don’t try to buy it today, though: It’s gone. DSTLRY’s plan is to make each issue available for sale for one week at a time, replacing it with a new issue every Wednesday. Once the collected edition is available in print, it will be widely available digitally as well (see “Former ComiXology Execs to Mix Digital and Print with New Publisher, DSTLRY”).
Omnibus is one of the new digital comics services that has sprung up since the demise of comiXology (see “Startup Digital Comics Platforms Aim to Get the Market Moving Again”), and IDW is the latest publisher to get on board. That brings licensed properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic, as well as IDW's original properties and Top Shelf titles, to the service. Omnibus also carries comics from Image, Dark Horse, BOOM! Studios, and others.
The digital manga site BookWalker posted its top 50 e-books (manga and light novels) of the year, and the results skew heavily toward isekai, stories of being reborn in another world. The top five were volumes of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, So I’m a Spider, So What?, Ascendance of a Bookworm, and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, all light novels, and Don’t Toy with Me, Miss Nagatori, which is manga. BookWalker is owned by Kadokawa (see “Kadokawa to Launch English Digital Retailer”) but carries manga from a variety of publishers.
Webtoon has hired David J. Lee as its Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer and promoted Yongsoo Kim to Chief Strategy Officer. Lee comes to Webtoon from Impossible Foods, where as COO and CFO he oversaw the launch of the Impossible Burger. Yongsoo Kim came to Webtoon in 2022 from KKR, where he was head of the KKR Capstone Team in Korea.