You may remember that I was very excited to review Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1 the other day. Unfortunately, my Local Comic Book Store, where the owner knows us by name and asks Rob wear his Gleek Underoos under his pants, did not have the book in stock. What to do? Take this as an opportunity to investigate the growing medium (sort of) of digital comics!

I downloaded Comixology onto my phone and an Asus Transformer Eee pad. From there, I was able to download a couple of books relatively easily to the app to read. I say “relatively” because, while the functionality is an easy “touch-the-button” user interface, it is a few long minutes before each book will appear on the device. So, there’s some wait time until gratification. And, while you can read any book you’ve purchased on any device on which you’ve installed Comixology, it appears you need to download books locally to the new devices. One digital comic book takes up 74 MB of space on the Eee pad.

Of course, once you have the books, how is the app overall for reading the books? That is the most important question after all.

Check out my video review of Comixology and the books I used it to purchase after the jump!

Crisis On Infinite Midlives hasn’t been around all that long in the greater scheme of things, but almost since our first day, we’ve been skeptical about digital comics, at least in the formats and forms of distribution in which they currently exist. Custom apps requiring mothership server authentication when you want to read your comics and with limited download and archiving options seemed less like buying comics than it did paying someone for the right to read their comics. This is very much unlike the experience of buying actual physical books from my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop offering ten bucks for half an hour alone with the Omaha: The Cat Dancer books.

Until now, these concerns have been a moot point. After all, digital comics is still a young field, and no matter which platform you chose to buy your digital comics, they would still be around for a while, allowing you to build your collection while the hardware with which to read that collection get better, faster, and more easily able to maintain your books locally. Right? Sure.

Wait, what?