Moving away from traditional virtual worlds for a post here, one of my favourite subject matters concerns story telling, in all its forms. On that theme I bring news that graphic novelist Alan Moore, has teamed up with his own daughter, Leah and Ocasta Studios to produce a new Open Source comic book app for the iPad, Electricomics.
Alan and Leah are no strangers to storytelling. Amongst Alan’s work are titles such as Wathcmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell. Leah and her husband John Reppion also have plenty of work to their names including titles based around Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who … not in the same story I should add, although there’s actually potential there.
So what exactly is this app, you may be wondering? Well the basic blurb tells us that Electricomics :
is a digital comics reader app, which gives you free access to innovative digital comics by some of the best writers and artists in the business.
However in terms of the project as a whole there’s far more to it than that. In a blog post announcing the launch of the app, they announced :
Coming very soon, you will be able to go to http://Electricomics.net and download the creator tool to your desktop PC or MAC. It lets you lay out, and package your own comics, and read them in the app.
You can build Infinite Canvas comics, where the reader follows the story from panel to panel in whichever direction it leads. You can make Panel delivery comics, where you have control of the reading experience at panel level, every panel can be a reveal, and the page is fluid, changing.
The professional comics are a jumping off point, we want you to join in, and push forward what is possible for yourself.
So this isn’t just an app for readers, there’s a creation aspect to it too, but there’s more, the app will be Open Source :
Open Source code is used throughout, and full access to our JavaScript library, so if you can see a piece of functionality you could add to it, the code is there to use, and we can add it to the next update.
Whatever is added to Electricomics remains Open Source, and the property of the community using it.
Take it. Make with it. Improve it. It’s yours.
That means there’s a lot of potential here for people to build on the code and go in new directions.
Continue reading “Electricomics – An Open Source Comic Book App For Creators And Readers”