Less than three years ago, the lights on digital comics seemed to be getting dim. In November of 2023, Amazon announced the impending shutdown of the Comixology app—the platform that had accounted for the large majority of digital comics sales from every major U.S. publisher for the past 10 years.
But a new digital landscape was quietly developing, as both longstanding comics publishers and upstart digital retailers carved out new approaches to producing, selling, and reaching an audience for online comics. Could 2026 be the year that the comics industry fully comes into its digital era? We talked with publishers and retailers to find out.
Today, though Amazon remains the top dog in digital comic sales, a number of competitors have arisen in the last few years. One of the newest has familiar faces behind it. David Steinberger and Chip Mosher were the co-founder and former head of content respectively for Comixology at the time the app was sold to Amazon. After departing in 2023, the pair went on to found the startup publisher Dstlry, before founding Neon Ichiban in 2025. Now a year into its operation, the aim for Neon Ichiban is to achieve something like physical comics collecting within a digital medium
At Neon Ichiban, these take the form of a number of unusual features: limited and numbered digital editions, signed digital remarques and sketches, and an in-app resale marketplace where collectors can swap and bid for their collectible items.
“In the comic book market, we’re a collecting society,” Steinberger says. “Well, what does that mean now?”
Meanwhile, at Sweet Shop, another new retail platform that launched in beta in late 2025, Kenny Meyers has a different approach. In contrast to Neon Ichiban’s suite of features, Meyers believes that the key to digital success is to keep the app and market as simple as possible.
“There’s a lot more to [digital comics] than gimmicks,” Meyers says. “People just want, in my opinion, very simple, elegant ways to discover comic books.”
DC Comics has hardly been a late bloomer when it comes to digital comics. The company sold its first single-issue digital comic more than 15 years ago, and was among the first publishers to embrace day-and-date digital sales. In 2007, they even (briefly) attempted to launch a digital-first slate of all-original titles—the short-lived Zuda imprint.
Today, DC is coming off a heady year of growth, fueled by sales of its new Absolute Universe imprint and the surprising success of its digest-sized DC Compact Comics. By the end of 2025, the publisher even overtook Marvel in comics shop market share for the first time in years.
And as new readers came to DC, new digital sales followed. “We’re finding an almost equal number of new readers coming in through physical and digital at the same time,” general manager Anne DePies says. “And once the digital readers come in, we’ve had meaningful success in seeing that they are purchasing across our ecosystem.”
Like other comic companies, DC doesn’t provide public figures for its total volume or revenue on digital sales, but DePies says that digital’s relative share of DC sales has remained remarkably stable over the past decade. That’s true of most other major publishers as well: at Dark Horse, VP of publishing sales Mark Bernardi says that digital readership leveled out to around 5% of sales many years ago, and has stayed in place ever since. At IDW, the share is a stable 10%. Image is a bit of an outlier; publisher and chief creative officer Eric Stephenson says digital sales have never recovered from a slide that started when Amazon bought Comixology.
For publishers, one strength of the digital format is its discoverability, serving as a casual entryway for new comics readers who later go on to become regular comic shop customers. DC, Dark Horse, and IDW all cited the Hoopla app—which partners with libraries to provide digital books, including comics—as a significant channel for new readers. Another avenue is the realm of natively digital comics like those on Webtoon (which boasts 145 million monthly users), which have long had a notably distinct readership from superhero comics, skewing both younger and more female than the comic shop market.
But if digital comics are increasingly serving as a pipeline for new readers, that just raises two new questions of its own: who exactly are the new readers, and how are digital platforms reaching them?
One digital retailer, GlobalComix, is looking across an ocean or two to reach new readers. GlobalComix, launched as a mobile app in 2023, is distinctive in two ways. First, the bulk of its business is subscription-based, rather than driven by individual day-and-date sales. And second it sees the biggest untapped audience in the vast, untranslated libraries of foreign comics, especially manga
Rydberg thinks the results have been a success: with more than 5 million translated manga pages to date on the platform, he says GlobalComix’s readership skews young (between 22–32 years old on average), international (25% of app users are overseas), and gender-diverse (he estimates a 60/40 split between men and women).
To appeal to these new sets of eyes, Rydberg has been experimenting with alternatives to the traditional ways comics are presented and sold to readers. In lieu of standard covers, for instance, he prefers to use the sort of attention-getting pages and panels that become memes on social media apps like TikTok and Reddit. As Rydberg puts it, “How do we frame this content in a way that can compete for attention against cat videos?”
Three decades into the digital era, it may be that the years of heady experimentation aren’t quite over after all—they’re just waiting once again to take the right shape.
