First of all, the full color screen and dimensions of the Apple ipad announced yesterday are indeed great for comic books. The screen size is very close in inches to the height of a comic book in print. No issue there, and the portrait mode is huge because reading comic pages on a landscape mode screen is fairly counterintuitive. The problem however comes when the drawbacks of the device are focused on, revealing it to be (for now) a fairly limited method of distribution.

For one, the device is not Flash enabled, continuing Apple’s trend of working around Flash as much as possible (it runs horribly on Mac computers). This eliminates several existing online displays for comics, including Marvel’s. No way to say if this was similar to the proprietary efforts put behind the .mp4 format on itunes, but the effect is the same; forcing people to go through your storefront to get your products. This brings up the second problem, and it’s one that has already been represented in the comics industry by Diamond distributions. Their stranglehold on the comic book distribution industry is monopolistic, pure and simple. There is nobody who even holds a future threat in terms of distribution for print comics. If the ipad takes off as a reader, Apple is in a position to take a similar place in the e-reader market for digital comic books.

On its own that may sound a bit “slippery slope-ish”, but consider another comic book overlord of the past: the Comics Code Authority. The CCA was the bane of creative freedom for comic book professionals censoring content and regulating imagination to the point of pidgeon-holding the direction of certain companies for decades. Before thinking that the situation has nothing to do with Apple, consider the similarity of these two stories.

First, the CCA defines for creators what is considered to be acceptable content for their books:

Later that year, the Comics Code Authority was formed, and it became nearly impossible to get a non-Code comic distributed — which effectively put an end to horror as a comic book genre. In fact, the word “horror” was forbidden to be used on a comic book cover, as were “terror” and “weird

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Second, Apple tells Trent Reznor, aka Nine Inch Nails, that his music app’s update is inappropriate to be sold in their store based on its musical content:

On discovering that Apple has refused to approve NIN’s latest iPhone app update, he tweeted: “Apple rejects the NIN iPhone update because it contains objectionable content. The objectionable content referenced is ‘The Downward Spiral.’” (“The Downward Spiral” is a 1994 album that laces a touch of earthy nihilism into a musical screwdriver of heavy psychological meltdown.)

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Attention is called to this minor similarity – not to paint Apple as some monolithic entity that has rejected music and app ventures in a pseudo-censorship role, but, to be honest about the potential for a lot more of something they’ve already done. In this case it’s even more troubling because Apple could end up being a combination of the CCA AND Diamond if this goes well enough for them. Who’s to say what should constitute acceptable content in the apps? And is a device so lacking in features really the one we want to take this risk with?

Personally I’ll be doing versions of my upcoming work for the ipad, and I hope it works well without interference on the creative level. I also hope that the same ratings restrictions on apps in the itunes store don’t end up compartmentalizing the digital comic buying public. And it will be a welcome alternative to the amazon kindle, which features a horrible profit sharing percentage and a far inferior screen. I also can’t be the only comics fan who tries and fails to read comics in bed or on the couch without bending pages. We’ll see in a few months.