Last month, Comixology pioneers and Dstlry cofounders David Steinberger and Chip Mosher returned to the digital comics marketplace game with a new venture, Neon Ichiban. Intended to attract readers, fans, and collectors alike, the fledgling outfit has already brought several major publishers on board, with comics from DC Comics, Kodansha, Marvel Comics, and more slated to hit the platform upon its official launch later this summer.
Named to evoke the neon-lit alleyway markets of Tokyo—the word “ichiban” means “number one” or “best,” while “ichiba” means market—the company aims to build upon Mosher and Steinberger’s efforts at Dstlry, which focuses on creator-owned comic books and collectibles, to inject a sense of value into digital comics. Neon Ichiban currently has a dedicated full time staff of around 10 people, and is backed with funding from French comics publisher Delcourt, the venture capital firm GFR Fund, and Kodansha.
New Beginnings
The origins of precursor Dstlry are curious. Steinberger had initially not planned to remain in comics at all. He had served as CEO and cofounder of Comixology, the digital comics retail platform that has since been swallowed by Amazon, from its 2007 founding until his departure in June 2022. After its 2014 acquisition by the e-tail giant, he also served as general manager of digital comics and manga, establishing and overseeing dedicated teams including one for digital manga based in Japan. After 15 years in the business, he told PW, he was hoping to take a break and wait for the next interesting idea to come along.
Mosher, who joined Comixology in 2011 to oversee marketing and PR, left Amazon just one month after Steinberger, after serving as the comics platform’s head of content and launching the creator-owned Comixology Originals line in 2018. But unlike Steinberger, Mosher was already champing at the bit to start a new kind of publisher. In came Dstlry, which publishes both print and digital comics, and where creators fully own the copyright to their work as well as a stake in the company itself.
“Chip had this great plan to try publishing out and treat creators better than they've been treated,” Steinberger recalls. “We spent some time working on that a little bit, and then it was like, ‘I want to do it again.’ ”
On the digital side, Steinberger wanted to see if there was also a way for Dstlry to bring the thrill of collecting floppy comics to their digital equivalent. The core of traditional comic book retail, he believes, still relies on selling monthlies to fans and completionists followed later by mass market collections, with sketches and signings at comic cons a crucial community touchstone. Was it possible to bring the intangibles of this sort of fandom to the digital experience, giving the digital product a real sense of value? And was there a way to give the authors a cut of every resale—something that is impossible in print?
Bullish on the prospect, the duo brought top creators with followings and a track record for quality output on board, among them Becky Cloonan, Jock, Jamie McKelvie, Junko Mizuno, Tula Lotay, and Scott Snyder, as it conducted its digital experiment. It began with variant covers and limited the quantity of purchases of its titles, which were made available exclusively from the Dstlry store. It followed up that effort with a full digital resale marketplace and, finally, a patent-pending commissioned remarque system to further personalize their products.
The innovations have proved popular and decently remunerative for creators; Becky Cloonan, writer of the Eisner Award–winning Somna, has reportedly made around $3,500 from remarques alone. And, Steinberger adds, “at the cons, when a fan comes up and shows their QR code for their book and the creator scans it and then signs or does a sketch, the reaction—both on the creator side and on the fan side—is true delight.”
Entering the Market
Over the course of the past two years, Dstlry built both a credible reputation as a publisher and a proof of concept for a new way of doing digital comics. The next step was scaling it up—and after keeping their ears to the ground since the beginning, Steinberger and Mosher decided earlier this year that now was the time.
“We stayed friends with all the publishers we worked with because I think they had a pretty good run with our last business,” Steinberger says. “It just seemed natural, given the state of things in digital, that if this is working for consumers, we should go ahead and take advantage of the moment and expand out, if publishers wanted to—and obviously they do.”
Digital comics have remained in a tumultuous place since 2022. Amazon’s integration of industry-leading Comixology into its own website and Kindle service has had a profound impact on the format, with some comics publishers claiming digital sales have remained suppressed by 60–90%. Shortly after, a handful of new companies emerged to try and fulfill the demand. Of those companies, subscription platform GlobalComix is currently the most prominent survivor following the closure of digital comics app Omnibus last August.
This left plenty of space for Neon Ichiban to make its market entrance. And the process of attracting publishers, Mosher says, was surprisingly smooth: “David and I are both super gratified by the reputations that we left our former employer with—with all the publishers. We started talking to people, and it just evolved from there.”
Neon Ichiban will operate primarily as a digital storefront, combining the innovations of Dstlry with new considerations in an effort to attract a larger variety of customers, including a tailored digital comics reader and its own community hub. Beyond limited availability digital variants, the platform will offer infinitely-available “mass market” editions.
Crucially, both formats are eligible for digital remarques and come with local downloads, as longs as their publishers opt into offering them. Publishers also have the option to offer those downloads either entirely free of digital rights management restrictions or watermarked with additional protections against unauthorized manipulation or printing. That means that any user who decides to leave Neon Ichiban can still take their digital comics with them. (There is, however, one caveat: Should a customer choose to locally download a particular book, that download is automatically opted out of the digital resale marketplace.)
Building Trust
One challenge for the fledgling business will be building trust among readers of digital comics after the series of enormous changes the space has undergone since its salad days. Companies have come and gone, taking customers’ digital libraries with them. And following Steinberger and company’s decision to sell Comixology to Amazon, those who bought heavily into the platform are now locked into Kindle whether they want to be or not. Is there a way to assure—or reassure—those readers that Neon Ichiban is worth their investment?
Transparency and clarity, Steinberger, believes, are the only answers. “It is super clear, when you buy an issue or volume on Neon Ichiban, what you're getting in terms of rights and license rights,” he says. “You have to have that transparency. You have to have that visibility of what people are buying. I think that’s super important.”
Another big draw for customers, the duo hopes, will be the range of comics Neon Ichiban will offer from the beginning. “Quite a few of the publishers right out of the gate, including from the biggest, will have downloadable versions,” Steinberger says. And he hopes that a platform with more choices, including local downloads, will prove itself “a huge unlock for how digital media is handled in general, that I think can bring a lot of trust back into the whole system.”
Neon Ichiban has another advantage, Steinberger says: it arrives on the scene nearly two decades since Comixology’s debut, after much market turmoil and technological advancement. “The tools that we have and the technology that we have between 2009 and today is incredible,” he says, “and yet there’s nobody that's actually approaching comics and manga in a way that North American people think about it. We believe, as we did back then, that this market should be way bigger—but it's super hard to penetrate, to understand, and to know where to start. So we're back in business to try and get that fixed.”
This article has been updated with further information.
