On February 14, 2022, the digital behemoth known as Amazon completed its decade-long digestion of the entity known as comiXology. The app broke. The site was demolished. The covenant with its readers, breached. By the end of the year, the team behind the store was dissolved – be they tossed aside or relocated to other limbs of the beast – and what remained was a chipped, hollowed shell, slowing disintegrating before our eyes.
On December 4, 2023, the shell turned to dust and from its ashes rose a putrid, loathsome thing. Broken and distended, born beneath the eclipse, it shambled onto screens, mewling and screeching. We knew it for what it was: usurper, destroyer, hellspawn. All that remained of what was once comiXology was finally, forever more, gone.
Gone, but not forgotten. Gone, save for the memories. Gone, ready to be eulogized.
Dawn of the First Day
To understand my 2023, we should start at the beginning. Not of the year, but of my time with comiXology.
I first encountered comiXology during a particularly tumultuous time in my life. The year is 2014. I am getting ready to graduate high school, work at a summer camp, and take a gap year in another country. I’ve recently been reintroduced to the world of comics, specifically DC and Snyder & Capullo’s “Batman” (Thanks Steve and Nick!)
Still, I’m not a Wednesday warrior. My comics reading is restricted to whatever I can read at a Barnes & Noble café or what I can find at my local library – I don’t have the disposable income, I don’t really have the time, and I certainly don’t have the space. I also don’t have the desire. Trade waiting suits me mostly fine.
The school year starts to come to a close and Nick shows me an advert for two new series: “New 52: Futures End” and “Batman Eternal.” Fuck. Those look cool. And they’re weekly. This could be my “52!”
I desperately want to read them. I know I can’t get them in print. Where would I put them? How would I get them in the middle of the woods or in a country where I struggle to speak the barest minimum of the language? No. I would have to figure out how to get them digitally.
Enter comiXology.
Scouring the internet for (legal) means of acquiring these comics day and date, sitting at my dad’s computer, I come across the DC Comics store. I discover it’s running on a platform called comiXology and while this site has only DC comics, the other one has loads more. I’m intrigued and decide to check it out.
OK. This looks promising. More importantly, it’s legit. I do a little more digging. Can I download the comics? Do I own them? What happens if this site shuts down? I don’t get any satisfying answer. I hem and haw. Is it worth it if I don’t have real ownership of the comics? Am I better off buying the physical issues and redeeming the code? Maybe, but it simply isn’t feasible.
I ask my dad for a subscription to one of the series as a birthday gift: “Batman Eternal;” the other, I decide to get myself. The contract is sealed and the die is cast. My digital comics will forever live within this walled garden. I accept. I do not approve.
At this point, I have no idea that comiXology has recently been bought up by Amazon. I don’t regard Amazon with as much suspicion or malice as I do now. I am more naive and, perhaps, it is marginally less cruel. It is certainly less – less – enshitified.
2014 seems so far away, now. Distant and impossible to fully grasp. It was the year I got a credit card. The year I stopped resisting smartphones. The year I got my first laptop as a graduation present; my first computer that wasn’t a shared, family desktop or acquired for $50 at a garage sale without a keyboard, a mouse or even a monitor. It was the first year I could build a comics library on my own.
It was the first year of a new age.
Continued below
Dawn of the Second Day
The next few years saw me dip my toes farther and farther into the waters of comiXology’s ecosystem. I begin perusing the free section, which never seems to update and rarely includes all the free books on the site. Strange. I chalk it up to bad coding. Now I think it was because the list was manual and “curated.” I find a couple gems, and plenty of chaff.
I soon graduate to buying new issues of books that call to me. There are fewer than you would expect, but more than I probably should have been buying. I’m doing this manually. Subscriptions are for the weak. Also, at this point, comiXology lets me charge individual purchases to a secondary credit card but subscriptions only to the primary. I must wait out the weekly gift.
I find myself waiting for sales. Series I like, and would like to purchase, but don’t mind reading a trade’s worth half a year later fall into this category. Classics or modern classics or even just weirdo trials do too. This is how I get “The Incal,” “Nailbiter,” Hickman’s “Avengers” and “New Avengers,” “God is Dead,” and Remender’s “Captain America,” to name just a few. The deals are excellent. I do not question how these excellent deals are possible.
Guided view is my friend. Smartphones make for a poor, traditional comics page experience, especially in 2014-2015. I find a happy medium and sail through issues after issue, hungrily gobbling up stories week after week, month after month. Once I am out of the woods, newly en-laptoped, and out of the country, I switch to the larger screen.
The wifi where I live is…bad. So bad. I cannot read online. I try out the Windows 8 app. It is…fine. It lets me download offline, its one saving grace. The files are not removable and so I cannot use my preferred reader. I am disappointed.
One day, my computer tells me it is nearly out of storage. The app, in its infinite wisdom, decided that deleting the comic did not delete the library download. I must manually sift through reams of files named 888hotn37w30h934y6 to remove the offending comics that are already gone but remain a phantom, haunting my hard drive. The same for stuck downloads.
This will be important later.
Soon, I return to the US and go to college. More and more comics companies join the platform. This is good for the unity of my library, and for the reading experience, though perhaps the true beginning of the end for all the other non-comiXology reskin shops. I begin taking advantage of DRM-free downloads and the slowly expanding roster of who is participating. I remain disappointed Dark Horse is not among them, even on their own store.
The app is dropped and I finally switch credit cards. I learn to tilt my computer sideways. That lasts for a few months until I can get an actual, real, honest-to-goodness tablet. Offline downloads, a sleek reading experience, and in-app purchases change the game.
Yes. In-app purchases. Android all the way. Apple’s predatory 30% cut was too rich for Amazon while Google’s heavenly 30% cut wasn’t a bridge too far. Or maybe Android had more loopholes to exploit to avoid the exploitation.
This becomes my status quo. For years, I bask in the glory of tablet reading, site/app purchasing, and a stable, mostly steadily improving experience – SD card downloads take way longer than necessary. ComiXology Unlimited is a boon, with its rotating cast of comics, seeming to find a balance of breadth and timeliness. Kodansha’s deal to release rescues of “Initial D,” “Drops of God” and “Mars” alone is worth it. It’s seemingly more sustainable than Netflix, though who knows what royalties are like.
I remain hopeful more companies will join the DRM-free project. I remain hopeful features like two-page reading or a local reader for PDFs/CBZ files will come to the app. I remain hopeful, despite signs that everything has stagnated.
It is now February 2022. News of comiXology’s end has been coming for a while. I have not been paying attention, assuming it will be like the ten other times things have changed under Amazon but nothing really changed. Think the linking of comiXology and Amazon accounts. Meaningful on the backend. Mostly meaningless on the consumer end, at least to me.
Continued belowThe change comes. It is forced upon the app. The site disappears. And everything
Falls
Apart.
Dawn of the Final Day
In last year’s My Comics Year, I shared how 2022 shattered my comics reading habits. There wasn’t just one thing which caused this, of course, it came down to number of factors; the self-imposed implosion of comiXology, though, was the biggest blow.
After the first few daysI know things are bad. It’s impossible to miss the paradigm shift because everything that could have gone wrong, does.
Subscriptions? Broken.
Series? Disjointed.
New comics for purchase? Impossible to find.
Your library? Unnavigable.
The reader? An absolute trainwreck.
Downloads? You remember what I said about the Windows 8 app. That, but worse. Faster than the old app, but far, far more broken without even a simple file work around to fix it.
DRM-free backups? HAHAHAHAHAHA get fucked. Amazon hates you, your library, and the people making the books you love.
Except…the app is still around. Awful as it has become, it is there, providing a modicum of solace and familiar(ish) access to my library. Then the next domino falls. Whatever individual subscriptions survived the purge, I cancel my comiXology Unlimited subscription, which I have had since the moment it launched, keeping me at its original rate, I cancel. Regular, weekly purchases, which have long ceased happening by this point, I fully give up on.
I shouldn’t be as surprised by this betrayal as I am. Perhaps because I joined comiXology at the beginning of the Amazon era, I knew nothing else. Others did, though the fall was far slower than predicted, as tends to be the case in all by the most Zazlaviest of acquisitions.
This change unmoors me. For nearly a decade, my comics habits had been dictated by the way comiXology arranges itself, had been enmeshed in comiXology’s web of subscriptions, purchases, sales, and readers. It was how I prioritized what to read, what creators I supported week in and week out.
It is where my comics collection is
I’m no fool. I know digital sales aren’t given equal weight to physical purchases. I understand the damaging economics of those sales thanks to Amazon’s predatory pricing structure. I get that it isn’t directly supporting a local comic shop. If I could purchase digital copies from my local LCS, DRM-free and untangled from proprietary systems that can, at any point, degrade and trap, I would in a heartbeat. Sadly, that’s not the digital world we live in.
I wish I could say 2023 dawned and I figured it all out. I got in a new routine. I started picking up the pieces, switched to another platform like Omnibus or GlobalComix or the various individual publisher’s stores or, hell, making a physical pulllist and buying a couple longboxes to hold it all.
Nah. 2023 is, like many years have been this decade, a falling out from the last, still tarnished and in turmoil.
There is at least one (bittersweet) silver lining to this whole fiasco: I am, perhaps, less tied to the lure of the new than I had been in previous years. I think my fellow Multiversity staff might disagree with that statement though. That is still one area in which I struggle, despite my years of griping. The compulsion towards completionism is a curse, a curse not even the collapse of comiXology could cure.
When comiXology initially left me grasping and flailing, trying to figure out what, if anything, I should be doing, I came to that awful realization above: that’s where my comics are. I still have hundreds, thousands!, of comics, many of which are unread and, without repurchasing them, only readable there.
Oh, sure. I make some decisions and became more comfortable with not being able to read everything I wanted right away or finding other avenues for reading said comics (trade waiting, Hoopla, Marvel/DC’s streaming libraries, haranguing my friends who own them.) Mostly what I do, however, is stare at the app with malice. It sits there upon my screen, taunting me with its green hues and broken promises.
I open the app, from time to time, and decide whether I want to subject myself to its whims. Whether it will load the book I want. Whether it will display the pages I want. Whether I can even find the damn thing in my library. For much of the year, this is all I do. Then in August, I go on vacation. It’s nice, and gives me plenty of time to catch up on those two years of DC comics I’ve missed and, once finished there, with what remains on the app, trapped in melting amber.
Continued belowIt is…fine. All that build up, all the burnt and broken bridges, all the consternation, and the reading experience is passable – as others have detailed, the app’s reader was far less the problem than the brower’s. Still clunky – the app crashes frequently, is slow to load, and downloads are busted, but the same is true of the DC Universe Infinite app. I know my library will never expand there again but, perhaps, I can learn to live with its subpar nature.
There is no great weight lifted, no relief found. It isn’t a major epiphany or realization. It is, however, something. After a year and a half of frustration, I can properly grieve the loss of what was once there, accept what it had become, and find a place for it. I can move on.
December 4th, 2023. The comiXology app officially shuts down. It comes as a shock, mostly because I’ve been reading “Love & Rockets” on it and the app was working fine. But there it is. A pop up telling me to download the Kindle app. My library is all there, organized with controls somehow more bare-bones than before. It does not upset me. I have already released my rage and frustration.
ComiXology was a monopoly and its dissolution in such a catastrophic manner is, I hope, good for the digital comics space. It has, at the very least, clarified for me what I want out of where I get my comics. It has reaffirmed my love of backbreaking physical omnibuses and saved my thumb quite a lot of pain. Yet I still mourn.
I still feel loss.
Loss for a platform that was great at its job. Loss for the place which brought me into comics and allowed me to experience the joys of serialized storytelling. Loss for the person I had been.
Goodbye, comiXology. Sail swift onto the seas. Goodbye, Elias of before. See me off and let me find my new paths. Wish me good luck, and many happy readings. Goodbye.
Goodbye.
