Closing ComiXology: Fragility in the Digital Comics Ecosystem

On the 4th of December 2023, the ComiXology app, which had once been a tent-pole product for the tablet computing category, was discontinued. Its contents were merged into users’ Kindle libraries and Amazon (which had bought ComiXology, the company, in 2014) maintained that users could ‘continue to access [their] Comixology comics, graphic novels, and manga titles in the Kindle app’ (Amazon, 2023). In some ways, this event had a relatively minimal impact: the ComiXology app’s functionality had been brought progressively closer to Kindle’s since the 2014 acquisition, and the two apps’ libraries had already started to overlap. Nevertheless, the shuttering of ComiXology represents an interesting case study to explore the interconnectedness of digital comics. It points to the complex relationships between files, software and hardware, and the ways in which these relationships impact on the experiences that we have of digital works. In this presentation, I outline a framework for the understanding of digital comics that situates the work within a broader context of digital infrastructure, and then reflect on how interactions between elements of this framework produce complicated situations for the creators and readers of digital comics. The presentation focuses particularly on the implications of digital interconnectedness for economic and historical understandings of comics and shows how ComiXology’s demise casts light on the fragility of certain types of digital comics.

Works Cited
Amazon, 2023. Important Changes to the Comixology app starting December 4, 2023. [Online]
Available at: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/comics-store/mkt/comixology-app-merge-faq [Accessed 8 December 2023].

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