Medium as a Web Comics Platform

Digital Comics
Medium as a Web Comics Platform
By Hervé St-Louis
August 19, 2014 - 16:39

Medium.com’s founders haven’t created their blogging platform for Web comics. Yet, with a few tweak, comics could become its killer app. Already, Medium hired Matt Bors as its regular political cartoonist. He also edits The Nib, a comic magazine hosted on Medium. I have tested Medium with a sample from Johnny Bullet, a Web comic I’m working on and it looked good.

Medium.com is the creation of several Twitter founders. Think of it as a larger Twitter where the platform does not limit word counts to 140 characters. Medium has become popular with the Silicon Valley clique and is now expanding beyond this base. The platform has no revenue scheme yet. Medium is somewhat nebulous about its future handling of copyrights.

Yet, Medium is easier to use than many other software although it does have some usability problems. Medium works with Facebook and Twitter. It allows users to log in and have a built in audience of followers imported from Facebook or Twitter. For what matters to cartoonists, the platform is friendly to large and small image posting. On Bors’s blog, his cartoons page allows users to navigate from the previous and next political cartoon. This is the main interface element missing to make Medium user-friendly for Web comic readers.

If Medium made a few changes to its platform, it could become a privileged destination for Web comic creators and readers.