About.com Rating

The Good

• Polished interface
• Offers regular bundles and sales on multiple comics
• Sells single issues and trade paperbacks
• Keeps track of purchases on other devices

The Bad

• Dark Horse titles only
• Occasional lags in response on iPhone/iPod touch

Rival publisher DC Comics took a lot of heat for taking so long to release its first digital comics app, especially after chief competitor Marvel had its ready for the launch of the original iPad.

Dark Horse took even longer than DC, though, with its app not debuting until well into 2011. Was the wait worth it, or is this simply a case of foot dragging?

Download at iTunes

Polished Interface & Onboard Help

The Dark Horse Comics app offers (as of July 2011) over 450 comics from Dark Horse's library. Everything from Frank Miller's Sin City to Hellboy, from Star Wars comics to Axe Cop (which is written by a 5-year-old) are present in the app, priced at US$1.99 for most single issues and around $5.99 for collections of multiple issues or longer works. The app also offers 30+ free comics.

While the app comes with two free comics by default--Hellboy and an adaptation of the Mass Effect video game--it also offers one other free title at launch: a help booklet. Download this and you'll get an onscreen demo of how to use the app. This is a touch I haven't seen in any comics apps and is a nice one, especially for first-time digital comics readers.

Once you've learned how to use comics, you'll need to create a free Dark Horse account in order to buy or download comics.

With that in hand, you're off to the funny pages. The Dark Horse app delivers comics quickly: a 26-page comic took about 2 minutes to download over 3G, and less than a minute over Wi-Fi. Its reading experience is pleasing: you can control page transitions (slide, fade, or none), decide whether you want to view the entire page or zoom in on one panel at a time (best for reading on the small screens of the iPhone and iPod touch; iPad users probably won't need that feature), and it remembers the place you left off in a comic even if you quit the app.

Bundles, Collections, and Bookshelves

While Dark Horse may have taken a while to release its app, since then it's done something that I haven't seen any of the other major apps do: release discounted bundles of comics. Lots of apps have sales on individual comics, but only Dark Horse (as far as I know) has offered one-click purchases of discounted bundles (that is, buy these 20 comics for $20, when their cover price is closer to $40). Dark Horse is also the only major publisher to release trade paperback-style collections instead of forcing users to buy the individual comics included in those collections at a higher price. These are two big wins for Dark Horse's app.

The Dark Horse app also divides your comics up into two groups: bookshelf and collection. Your bookshelf is the comics downloaded to the app you're currently using and available to read there. The collection lists all the comics you've downloaded from the app using your account, no matter what device you used, and lets you sync them to other devices with one touch.

A Small Downside

This isn't an app with many downsides, but I did find that it would occasionally lag and its interface would be slow to respond on the iPhone and iPod touch. This didn't happen too often, and not enough to be a major irritant, but it would be nice to see that ironed out of future versions.

The Bottom Line

If you're a fan of Dark Horse's mix of indie, licensed, and Japanese comics--and you should be; Dark Horse is terrific--the Dark Horse Comics app is just about the only place to get their titles for your iOS device (there are a handful of titles available at comiXology). And while it took the company a while to release its app, that wait was well worth it.

What You’ll Need

The DC Comics app is compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch; an optimized app is also available for the iPad. You’ll need iPhone OS 3.0 or later. 

Download at iTunes