It may sound strange now, but a few years ago when writers Mark Waid and John Rogers decided to launch a digital comics site, the idea of a comics writer as established and respected as Waid getting into the digital business seemed controversial. Since then digital comics have become a fact of life for comics readers and publishers and Thrillbent, their comics portal, has grown into a full fledged publisher with over 350 comics in its library. You can also now download a Thrillbent iPad app with functionality that far bigger apps don’t offer. And the digital side has come full circle with the recent announcement that several Thrillbent titles will be coming to print.
In 2015, IDW will publish print collections of Insufferable by Waid and artist Peter Krause, and Empire, by Waid and artist Barry Kitson. In addition, The Damnation of Charlie Wormwood by Christina Blanch and Chris Carr, a Breaking Bad-like thriller about a college professor who goes to the dark side, first serialized on Thrillbent, is being published as a monthly periodical by Dynamite.
Launched in 2012, Thrillbent offers comics on both a per issues basis and as a $3.99 a month subscription that gives full access to all the comics. Among the series offered are such acclaimed series as the historical fantasy Valentine by Alex de Campi and Christine Larsen, and the supernatural mystery Moth City by Tim Gibson. Although the company was co-founded by Rogers and Waid, the latter is the voice and face of the company.
For the print editions, IDW is bringing back two titles. Empire is actually the second volume of a story originally published by Image Comics back in 2000 about a supervillain who succeeds in his plan to take over the world, but must deal with the political complications that come with conquest. IDW will bring out a new edition of the first volume so new readers can get up to speed.
Insufferable is the first series that Thrillbent launched—it’s about a superhero and his arrogant former sidekick who have to reunite for one last adventure. This will be its first print appearance.
Waid says that print editions of his Thrillbent titles was always part of his plan, but since part of what the website offers is advanced storytelling techniques possible only on digital—clicking on a panel reveals dialog in a serial fashion, for instance—none of them were really print ready. “This calls for a lot of paste-up work—when I assisted with Wormwood, I was figuratively back in fourth grade with a glue stick and scissors, cutting and pasting to adapt the material back to print without losing anything,” he told PW Comics World. “Harder than it looks! And there'll be a fair share of that with all Thrillbent properties, but the goal will always be to give the reader the same story, just in a different reading experience.”
IDW was one of several publishers that offered to bring Thrillbent to print, but “it was a combination of the resources IDW was willing to put behind the effort (production and promotion) and their ability to help our digital comics find new, emerging markets,” that made them his choice, Waid says.
Thrillbent has expanded beyond just offering comics on their website and via Comixology to launch its own app for iPad, which offers access to all their titles but also functions as a full-featured digital comics reader—users can import their own comics in the CBR/CBZ/PDF formats via Dropbox. It’s a feature not yet offered by Comixology, although it’s planned for an update of iVerse’s ComicsPLUS app—but it offers a great deal of convenience for readers who may have collected a lot of digital comics by various means. “We were giving away PDFs of EMPIRE volume one, for example, to new subscribers,” says Waid. “But in order to read that PDF, you had to import it into a different program. Now everything's consolidated. [Subscribers] can still stream any of the hundreds and hundreds of comics on Thrillbent to your app (or to the website) for the subscription cost of $3.99 a month, but if you want to buy any of the comics to keep as your own, DRM free, you can download them right into the app.”
More comics and apps are on their way, according to Waid. A third volume of Insufferable launched last month and an Android version of the app is in the works.
