Though I’ll be holding off several years before getting any sort of tablet reading device, I have to admit that the iPad does make the idea of reading color comics in a digital format far more palatable. My greatest reason for standing behind b/w comics has always been simple: they’re cheaper to print. My greatest reason for staying away from digital comics has been simple as well: horizontal screen format.

I started out trying to make comics for the web, and trying to make a vertical format work on a horizontal screen is iffy at best. The horizontal format works for strip-type comics, but it doesn’t work for dynamic, panoramic comics. Action comics in particular seem to suffer; the body is vertical, so trying to make an action scene where the body takes up the full page in a horizontal format doesn’t have the same impact.

Tablets like the iPad (of course, I’ll be buying something more like the Lenovo tablet eventually since the Apple OS is poison for this Windows geek) enable a vertical digital environment that wasn’t previously available. The same kind of environment that print has embraced for centuries. The vertical format is preferred for innumerable reasons, and the main two reasons the horizontal format has worked for digital for so long are because of the shape of the keypad and navigation. But get rid of the keypad because it’s a consumer device, not a productivity device, and move the navigation bar to the top, and you have, essentially, a return to the print format.

I look forward to having a tablet myself, one day, and being able to purchase color comics at, I HOPE, a fraction of the current price. I do love color … but if only it weren’t so expensive. And considering color is printed at a lower resolution than b/w anyway (sort of…),the loss in quality from print to screen isn’t as noticeable.