How to Find Free Comic Books for Your iPhone/ iPod Touch!

I like pictures. I like words. I like free stuff. Put them all together and what do you get? Gold. Or in other words, another reason to spend hours draining the battery on your iPhone or iPod Touch mining the App Store. Comics exist on the iPhone and they are good. Of course the immediate response to this would be the question of how to fit a whole comic book page onto such a small screen and still be legible. Think of comparing that small screen to the average size of a single panel on a page and you begin to see how the conversion process can work. Obviously, there are some disadvantages to the small screen, but surprisingly, there are advantages to the new format as well. Many companies actually tailor each panel to fit on the screen, sometimes even splitting the panel to separate the dialogue. This creates a slightly different reading experience. Whenever I read comic books I always end up scanning the page, no matter how hard I try not to, and so I always have a sense of what is coming up. When you can only see one panel at a time, however, it creates more suspense. I also feel like I can appreciate the artwork more fully when it is only one scene at a time.

More and more people are catching on to this novel idea and more companies are offering new titles. But how do you convince people to give it a try if they are skeptical? Well, just as many companies offer free, lite versions of their apps, many comics are available as a few page sampler or even a whole first issue for free!

So now you know comics exist and you also know there are a bunch of free ones. Your final mission is to wade through the App Store or iTunes to find those gems. Unfortunately, there is no specific category for comic books, so trying to track them down is a little tricky. Here are a few suggestions to make things easier. First of all, whether you are using the App Store through iTunes or whether you are using it on your iPhone/iPod Touch, the best way to filter out unwanted apps is to search by company name. If you are using the your iPhone/iPod, then you still have to search through the paid comics to find the free ones. You can type the name of the company and free, for example typing "iVerse Media free", but for some reason this doesn't always find all of the free selections. This isn't really a big problem since most of the companies only offer a few comics altogether, so that searching through their selection doesn't take very long. If you want to avoid this I suggest using iTunes. After you search under the company name, then make sure you have the price set up as one of your view options. Once that is set up, then click on the price to have all of the results listed in order from least expensive to most expensive. This will make all of the free comics appear at the top of the list.

My final suggestion is not really a suggestion but a list of the companies which offer these freebies. I have put them in order of how many freebies they offer, from most to least. And also, these are companies which offer their comics as stand alone apps. This means each comic book is one app. There are a small number of companies which offer free comics, but only downloadable through their reader app, which you have to buy. These are also a great find, since the readers are still relatively cheap.

iVerse Media
Robot Comics
Keenspot Entertainment
NTT Solmare
Smashout LLC
Crispy Comics
iRemedi Corp.
XKCD
Eddie Rise
Manga BlackBox
UCLICK LLC
CARNIVAL COMICS
Catastrophic Comics
Iceberg Reader
IDW Publishing
iMobbit
NexStudios.jp
Nextwave Multimedia Pvt Ltd
Abacus In Motion Company Limited
AFEEL, Inc.
Dark Horse Comics
Digital Thought Software
fika
Graphics Lab 2
IKKooN - Fred Courteille
MICRO MAGAZINE, INC
MobFarm S.r.l.
Patoing mobile media
Pure Elemental
Squidi.net
Tundra Comics
Walt Disney Stan Lee

These companies don't have any freebies, but you might check them out anyway:
3 Dynamics (Asia) Limited
BlackHiveMedia
D. Noel Keshwar
Hot Source Co., Ltd.
Kamikaze!
Kosaido
Lush Comics
Matteo Sacco (or C4DHotline)
Ramiscal
THQ Wireless Inc.

If you are having trouble filtering other items out of your search, be sure to type in the company name exactly. This will help eliminate unwanted findings. Happy freebie hunting!