Comique

The old version of Comique is going away on April 1st. After this date you’ll no longer be able to reach artists.comique.co, or download the iOS app.

In preparation for this, there’s a new version of Comique for iOS that allows you to have all the comics you've purchased in the app zipped up and delivered to you by email. Just tap the little email icon in your Library, and you’re on your way to having all your purchased comics emailed to you at full resolution.

I'm so happy that I can finally show you New Comique, an easy, appealing way to publish your comics online.

It's web based, so it works on anything with a browser.

It’s responsive, so comics looks great on big and small screens.

It’s open to everyone, so anyone can join and publish their comics.

It's also got per-page analytics, a new, more flexible vertical format, comic sets, dedicated links, comic embeds — and so much more is on the way.

If I could start all over again and make Comique from scratch, here’s what I’d do:

Make it online, so you could read on any device with a web browser

Let comic makers have their own customised homepages

Scrap the submission process — comic makers could publish comics as they pleased

Offer a more flexible format for comics

Take out the middlemen, so comic makers would be paid more

Funnily enough, this is exactly what I’ve done since I started remaking Comique from scratch earlier this year. It’s currently being tested by some of our good friends, but you can read catneep’s lovely Kitteh #1 and Kitteh #2 on New Comique right now.

We've got a new comic on Comique by Corey Lewis, creator of Sharknife from Oni Press. "In a city bummed out by laziness, BAT RIDER skates his way to freedom."

Have you read Mathilde's Kitteh journals yet?

A couple of pages from the new comic by Pip Craighead “Night Museums”, a short story about the feeling of being in a museum at night...

Yesterday I posted my first Comique developer diary, which explained what Comique’s highest priority is, and an idea for how to solve it without going completely mad. tl;dr: Comique needs to be available on all devices, but to make that work I need to bundle several different projects into just two manageable ones.

One of those projects is the existing iOS reader app, and the other is an all-new web app for making, browsing, buying and reading comics. This web app needs to be rock-solid, easy to maintain and develop new features for, and most importantly — and maybe contrary to all the previous points — it needs to happen fast. How the hell am I going to manage that?

Join me, traveler, as we take a trip to the figurative hardware store and work out which tools are going to get this job done.

Starting fresh

Right now, the closest thing Comique has to a web app is artists.comique.co. This is the website comic makers currently use to upload and edit comics, view their sales, and manage their payment information. It’s also got some features just for me like making royalties easier to calculate, sending push notifications to the app, and sending mass emails to artists.

It’s got a lot of the functionality this new web app will need. But for various reasons, it’s not a good project to expand into a full-blown reading app. It was built with a lightweight framework called Sinatra that makes it very easy to get something up and running with, but doesn’t scale well to big user-facing projects. It encourages you to do a lot yourself: it’s really great if you want to learn about the challenges involved in making a good app.

But a lot of those problems are ones that have already been solved, like: ‘what’s the best way to have user accounts in your app?’, or ‘what’s the best way to serve images and stylesheets?’, or ‘how do I get easy (and secured) access to information in a database?’. Super fun stuff, I know.

What I was looking for was a framework that took care of a lot of these solved problems with respected, established solutions. And it would be great if it would use a programming language I’m already comfortable with, like Ruby — then I could maybe even reuse some of the code from artists.comique.co! 

Fortunately there is such a framework, and it’s called Ruby on Rails.

(note: I used to turn my nose up at Ruby on Rails because I didn’t like how much ‘magic’ there was involved with it — it hides a lot of what’s happening under the hood. This is why I chose Sinatra for artists.comique.co. But now that I’ve got experience building my own web app, I’ve got an idea of what it’s taking care of, and how little I care about doing that myself. Still, I think I’ve learned more by trying it out myself first).

This way a lot of problems are solved out of the box. Improved security, more efficient asset serving, user accounts — all there without me having to do a whole lot. 

Continuing the carpenter analogy which makes me feel as if I’m an exciting outdoors person working with my hands, this is great: instead of me having to go the forest, chop down trees, transport the lumber back and cut it into planks myself, I have a whole truckload of planks, ready to go.

And that’s the system for the backend decided on. This’ll do all the lifting on the server that’ll give users the comics they’re looking for, upload comic pages to servers, and make sure no-one is looking at comics they’re not allowed to see!

Now I can let Rails worry about the boring stuff, and think about the bit I love the most.

The fun stuff

Even though I spend a lot of my time programming, for me it’s a means to an end — and that end is great interfaces. In Comique, I want reading comics to feel fantastic. And I want making those comics to feel fantastic too.

It’s hard work. There’s a lot of moving parts: the information you have at hand, like text and images; how you present them; and how they behave when you interact with them.

And on the web, these three different domains all have their own systems. Information is provided in hypertext markup language, styled with cascading style sheets, and interaction dealt with by Javascript. In a big project, you have to keep these three systems working together, even though they don’t really know everything about each other.

When a project gets big enough, it can start to get really confusing. Which bit connects where? Where’s the markup for that widget again? Where does this bit get its title from, exactly? 

Without vigilance, a project becomes hard to maintain and eventually starts to be neglected. And who likes a neglected project? No-one, that’s who.

I’ve dealt with these problems before, and I’ve never been completely satisfied. Despite my best intentions and organisational efforts, things would slowly start to get out of whack. I don’t think this is just me, I’m now convinced that it’s a problem borne out of the standard tools available to us (but that’s an argument for another post).

A few months ago, this tweet caught my eye:

Last year I watched a presentation titled WWDC 2014: Advanced iOS Application Architecture and Patterns, featuring Andy Matuschak and Colin Barrett, and came away very impressed with their ideas about managing the flow of information in applications and their interfaces. Of course I’ve used UIKit a lot in making Comique for iOS, and while it’s not perfect, there’s a lot to like. So when Andy Matuschak mentions this thing called React, I’m all ears.

To keep this short and simple, React is a framework that makes you bundle all of these concerns — markup, presentation and behaviour — into modular components that encapsulate everything about them. When you want to change something, you know exactly where to change it. When there’s a bug, you have a very good idea of where it’s hiding. When you want to reuse interfaces you’ve built before, you can do so, like recombining Lego bricks.

It’s unusual and controversial. Not everyone likes it. There are a lot of people who think you shouldn’t mix markup, presentation and behaviour together, and a lot of people who don’t trust it because it’s made by some rather brilliant engineers from Facebook.

But I love it, and it’s what comique-web’s UI is built with. It’s so wonderfully straightforward to build with, and it encourages you to build interfaces which are resilient and lightning fast. (It’s also allowed me to build an interface that is entirely indepedent of Ruby on Rails and could be transplanted onto a new backend very easily, should that ever need to happen).

It might also be what powers the interface of the iOS reader app in the future, and would definitely power the UI of a potential future Android app. It’s exciting stuff.

But that’s enough tooling around. Tomorrow I’ll get round to sharing what I’ve been making with these frameworks, and the features which will make up comique.co. 

Red Earth Legend, by Rosie Brand (rosiebrand):

A long time ago, out of the darkness, the Red Earth was born. This is but one of her stories. Suitable for children and adults, Red Earth Legend tells of the love, jealousy and bad mistakes that shaped this parallel world.

I’m personally a big fan of this kind of modern myth-making, and it’s rendered in such an obviously handcrafted way that it’s hard not to fall in love with it. 60 pagelets, $2.99.

Kitteh, by Mathilde Kitteh:

Dis is Kitteh's journal (1st entry).

I’m really proud to welcome Mathilde Kitteh (catneep​) to Comique with her first comic, Kitteh, which is FREE! This is a beautiful, journal-style comic complete with Mathilde’s lovely, whimsical style. We’re pumped to have her on Comique.