iPod and iPhone Concessions

To paraphase Stan Lee, With Great Opportunties comes Great Work, so for the past week, I've been reworking our League of Monsters By Butterfly Betrayed comic into a format that will be better suited for the iPod/iPhone.

It's been an eye opening experience as I've had to change many pages from the way we originally made them. For example, here is the Roll Call Page as created by Pierre:



While I love the heads for each character that flank the main panel, on the iPod, this just didn't seem to be working. So, I felt it was best to break out the text in the yellow box onto a separate page and make a new Roll Call page.



In some cases, the revisions were simply a matter of breaking out panels onto their own...like this page with 3 panels...



Which would look like this on the iPod - making the text too small to read.



Now becomes these two screens...





Sometimes it was necessary to move balloons and add some text to make a better transistion - like in this case with the Blood Vs Butterfly scene



I felt the text was too small so I reworked the page like this:





Sometimes, I just have to completely redesign a page using the existing art to make something we can use. This page with a diagonal panel layout was such a case. It *might* have worked on the iPod, but odds are the text would be hard to read.



So I broke it out like this which I think will work better on the iPod. Not a perfect revisioning, but I think it shows the story better.





So far, this has been a good deal of work, and some people might question why I'm going through all this trouble. Well, the answer is, Pierre and I have always prided ourselves for designing comics to be read in a digital format (CBR) so it would have been a hard pill to swallow to see iPod versions of our comics that were hard to read.

There are several companies making comics for the iPod now (we've been approached by nearly every single one of them) and I just wasn't happy with how those companies were handling the conversion process. Many of them don't seem to care about readability or the user experience.

It wasn't until recently that I was contacted by a company (who will remain nameless for right now) who really had an amazing system to handle the formatting process that I decided the time was right to convert one of comics into the iPod format. Like I say, it wasn't a slam dunk, as I've had to do a good deal of rework. It's been a real learning experience, but in the end I'm hoping I'll understand what you can do in this format well enough to capitalize on it when Pierre and I begin our next League of Monsters comic!

I hope this helps anyone else out there working on an iPod comic.

- Jim