If you’re looking to get in on the iPhone/Android/Kindle mobile digital comics gravy train, you’d do well to read Alex de Campi’s post today over at Bleeding Cool, where she lays out the specific formatting options and size restrictions in place for display of your comics on each of the currently popular handheld devices. Nice tutorial!

I’ve been following the phenomenon of digital comic sales through iTunes, for reading on iPhones and iPod Touches, with a great deal of interest lately. Seems to be heating up. For some reason, people will pay for digital content on a mobile device that they’d expect to get for free in a web browser (see: ringtones, small sprite-based games, and wallpapers). I don’t know why this is. I don’t know how long it will last. But it does seem to be the case. And this includes comics. I spoke with a fairly well-known indie creator the other day who told me that his sales, through iVerse’s digital comics app, are in the “tens of thousands a month.” That’s more than he’s selling in the Direct Market, in the form of comic books. And it’s more than anybody ever sold through Modern Tales or, I’d bet, Bitpass. The Transformers comic was the number one app in the App Store for several weeks, and then the Spider-Woman motion comic was very, very popular, apparently, and so on.

All of which is weird to me, because all the things people complain about when they complain about reading webcomics on a computer screen are even more annoying when reading digital comics on a tiny handheld screen. I guess iTunes is able to reach people who don’t read print comics, therefore they have no reason to complain about digital ones? Maybe? And maybe they don’t even read webcomics, either? I dunno. Everybody reads at least one webcomic, I think. And that one webcomic is probably xkcd.

So, yeah, anyway, whatever the reason, it does look like we’ve got ourselves a burgeoning little digital comics marketplace, in the form of iTunes, almost by accident. But it’s still kind of unorganized and messy to buy comics there, as opposed to other kinds of stuff you might want to buy in iTunes. If you want to buy a TV show in iTunes, you click the “TV Shows” tab. Right? If you want to buy a song, you click “Music,” and so on. If you want a game, you go to the App Store and filter down to games.

There’s no such category for comics; they’re all over the place. You can buy digital comics in the “TV Shows” section (like Spider-Woman and Watchmen: The Motion Comic). You can buy comics in the “App Store” section as one-off e-books (like “Godland Issue 3“). You can buy comics within the context of some multi-comic meta-apps like iVerse, mentioned above, which has its own store within the app, and whose competitors are the Comixology app and the Panelfly app — both of which have their own, completely separate, in-app stores. There may be three or four more of these comics-library-and-store type apps by the time you read this.

And now you can even buy digital comics in the “Music” section of iTunes, thanks to “iTunes LP,” Apple’s new multimedia format ostensibly created as a way to boost whole-album sales (over single-song sales) by bringing back the meta-material (liner notes, artwork, etc) associated with vinyl albums, but which has been bent to the purposes of displaying Tyrese Gibson’s “Mayhem.” In fact, “Mayhem” was, according to this post at the Apple Insider blog, the very first iTunes LP made available for sale. So comics beat actual albums to the format that was supposed to bring back record album sales! Just more proof that comics is one of the most entrepreneurial little industries, like, ever.

But it’s still confusing. On iTunes, a comic is a TV show, or it’s an ebook, or it’s a subset of a larger app, or it’s a record album. There’s no one place to go browse iTunes just to find comics.

I wonder if Apple will ever decide to set up a standard format for digital comics, and create a section of iTunes where they can be easily found? This might be a very good thing for digital comics sales, and maybe a very bad thing for some of the companies who are building their own stores, either through iTunes apps or otherwise. I kind of like the mayhem (no pun intended) right now. But I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long term. At some point, some software platform and file format and distribution mechanism will take over. My guess is that Apple is in as good a position as any — is in a better position than most — to step up and create those things. That doesn’t mean that they will, though. Just that I’d be surprised if they don’t.

This Associated Press story about uClick/goComics’ paid subscription service for digital comic books on cellphones has some interesting numbers. Apparently there are 55,000 subscribers reading “Bone” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” on the supersmall screen, though many of these subscribers are still in the “free trial phase.”

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