Longbox coming to Xbox 360 (possibly)

The Lost Gamer is a website that covers news in, well, video games. We should be thankful that they managed to find themselves enough to report on what could be a really fascinating extension of Xbox Live: comics. According to the website, LongBox Digital Comics is aiming to make a splash on the digital comics scene by providing them for consumption via Xbox Live. This is defintely hearsay and conjecture at this point and prices are far from confirmed, but LongBox CEO Rantz Hoseley is aiming at $0.99 an issue and $10 for 20-issue archived editions. Hoseley states “With the Twitter/Facebook/Last.fm integration it was very obvious to us that this was a great fit.” The new dashboard application will allow you to browse, purchase and read a variety of comics in a fashion very similar to purchasing movies and TV shows (in this case the "read" is replaced with "watch"). I would imagine that the reader will have some other functionality including zoom in and out, and possibly multiple page views. I would expect to see only comics from Top Cow and Image to start, but the publisher list could grow with popularity of the application. I'm generally in favor of this, however there is one major caveat: it will succeed as long as comics are priced evenly. That is, Marvel comics can't sell for $1.99 just because they're Marvel. If LongBox follows an iTunes model and every comic is evenly priced then I think the service will be hugely successful. Comics are inching closer and closer to that magical realm we call digital and this would be a boon for drawing more attention to them. It is similar to the PS3 comic service being touted for the PSP, but any and all exposure has to be good for business. Longbox coming to Xbox 360 (possibly)

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