American comic book fans live for Wednesdays. That's the day the new issues arrive. Every major American comic book publisher uses a single distributor, Diamond, to ship boxes of their latest releases to roughly 2,200 comics retail stores across the country. The shop owners—or their minions—put that week's crop of Batman or X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the shelves, and then the fans arrive. A lot of them go to the same store every week, where they have a "pull list" on file, books they've asked to be set aside so they'll never miss a single pulse-pounding issue. It's a tradition.

To be more specific, it's a dying tradition. The Wednesday crowd is the old-school audience, collectors who are willing to shell out $3 or $4 for a stapled-together pamphlet that they'll put in a plastic bag with acid-free cardboard and store in a long white box. Those customers have been trickling away for years.

Illustration: Nathan Fox

But that's OK, because about two decades ago publishers picked up a second category of customers. These newer readers generally prefer the classier term graphic novel and would rather buy their comics as squarebound books. They might pick up a stack of them five or six times a year, rather than chasing issues every week. That was just fine with publishers, especially the industry's 8,000-pound super-gorillas Marvel (owned by Disney) and DC Comics (owned by Time Warner). For them, graphic novels meant that decades' worth of back catalog could generate income again and provide an entrée into bookstores.

A third group of readers has come along even more recently: Internet- savvy young fans who download pirated versions of everything. At first the comics industry didn't pay much attention to this new generation. Unlike the music and movie businesses, comics experienced an unprecedented boom in the mid-2000s, thanks to the rise of graphic novels, as well as manga from Japan. Besides, the fan-made scans of new issues that showed up online, usually just a few hours after the print versions arrived in stores, were kind of a hassle to download and read on a computer. The unwieldy nature of the whole process made the print-comics industry feel as though digital comics, legit or otherwise, weren't worth the trouble.

Then Apple introduced the iPad. Its touchscreen is just a bit smaller than those staple-bound pamphlets and looks a lot cooler. For comics fans, the new device was a lot like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen: naked, glowing, and powerful beyond comprehension. Now the comics industry is slowly, agonizingly, belatedly backing into digital distribution, but with a deeply unusual goal in mind: to push digital customers toward brick-and-mortar stores for long enough to make sure the business can survive its forthcoming, unavoidable mutation.

Comics, as it happens, look magnificent on tablets. But no one in the comics industry is really ready for what that magnificence implies. Sales of periodical comics are falling, and there's no iTunes Store equivalent to sell them digitally—no single place where readers can buy all the comics they'd ever want, old and new, to read on their tablets. (Fans can still download them in pirated form, of course.)

David Steinberger, cofounder of comiXology, would like to change that. Launched in 2007, comiXology was initially an online pull-list management service designed to be used by both retailers and readers. In 2009, it introduced a digital-comics reader for the iPhone, with just 80 titles from independent publishers (in comics-speak, "independent" means neither Marvel nor DC). Many similar apps appeared around that time, but comiXology's came with a nifty feature that automatically jumped from panel to panel, making the most of the iPhone's small screen.

ComiXology's best-selling title for 2010.

In the past two years, though, Marvel, DC, and Image (publisher of The Walking Dead series) all tapped comiXology to create branded apps for the iPhone and iPad. The company essentially built digital stores so the big publishers didn't have to. That move turned comiXology into the Hulk in a room full of Daredevils. It wasn't part of the original plan, but comiXology's history of working closely with brick-and-mortar stores on pull lists gave it an edge with publishers. "We were in the weirdest position of any digital-comics company," Steinberger says. "We were already connected with the retailer."

So comiXology's tech was able to satisfy the publishers' main criterion for a digital presence: Don't mess with the stores. Unfortunately for fans, though, that means that Marvel and DC readers can buy shockingly few new single issues for download—it's mostly classics and compendia. Releasing new comics digitally, goes the theory, would erode the shops' customer base. So sacrosanct is this tenet that in November 2010, when Marvel accidentally released the second issue of Ultimate Comics Thor digitally a week before it was supposed to hit stores, the publisher pulled the issue and temporarily locked the copies of everyone who'd already bought it.

North American comics have effectively become the R&D department for a whole lot of higher-stakes media, from movies and television shows to videogames and Broadway musicals.

Illustration: R. Kikuo Johnson

In fact, the Big Two have been going far out of their way to keep physical retailers happy as they expand into digital. Even when newly published comic books are available digitally, they generally cost as much as their analog counterparts. ComiXology's apps even include a Buy In Print function that directs users toward the nearest comic book store. So why don't comics publishers just cut out the physical middleman, shift to higher-profit-margin digital for everything, and rake in the dough? Not so fast, Quicksilver. Local stores—and their devotees—drive not just the industry's steadiest profits but its development of new material. If more than the tiniest fraction of that fragile market gets cannibalized by digital sales, then those stores will start folding. If that happens, the majority of print readers who don't have fancy tablets will have nothing to buy on Wednesdays anymore. And if digital sales alone aren't enough to cover writers' and artists' fees and publication costs and underpin a marketing apparatus, the entire structure will blow up like Krypton. So it may sound like a counterintuitive move, but the industry can't afford to alienate its analog retailers. "If you undermine and disrupt the industry in a big way immediately, that's it," Steinberger says. "It's over before digital even gets started."

Illustration: Nathan Fox

As Steinberger suggests, comics are a fragile ecosystem. In all their printed forms these days, they're roughly a $650 million annual market in North America. That's huge by historical standards but a rounding error for Time Warner and Disney (and one-sixth the size of the comics market in Japan). Digital-comics sales are even smaller potatoes: Last year in North America, they brought in somewhere between $6 million and $10 million, roughly 1 percent of the revenue generated by comics and graphic novels printed on dead trees, according to ICv2, a website that tracks the business of pop culture.

Those figures are expected to rise dramatically, though, and Jim Lee is one of the people who's overseeing the transition. As copublisher of DC, Lee has become the company's point person for digital, although he made his name as an artist. (He drew the first issue of an X-Men series that Marvel launched in 1991, which sold around 8 million copies—making it the best-selling single issue of all time.) But when Lee describes what DC would like to do digitally, he doesn't talk about converting the Wednesday store shoppers to digital customers. Like his counterparts at other comics publishers, he talks about using digital comics to bring in "lapsed fans, people who read comics at some point, or people who are curious, who are finding comic books for the first time through these new devices."

As far as he's concerned, the ink-and-paper comic book is king: "We have this very devout, fanatical, core group of fans, and the vast majority prefer reading comics in print." He talks about digital sales as a "new newsstand," a way to reach readers who would never set foot in a comics store, get them hooked, and then point them to places where they can buy more stories on paper. In other words, where some see an outmoded industry, he sees a potential for expansion—a whole new customer base that can be lured in by the convenience of tablet apps and converted to the pleasures of old media.

That scenario flies in the face of every other mass medium's transition to digital distribution. On top of that, other media—take the recording industry, for example—have had a seven-year head start on persuading customers to pay for downloads. An entire generation of comics readers has grown up with pirated scans as their only digital option. Nobody really knows how many of the people who used to collect comics on paper have shifted to torrenting everything and how many have just shrugged off the habit and moved on to Game of Thrones or Call of Duty or graduate school.

None of this would matter much at the mega-corporate level if comics were just a few hundred thousand readers and a few thousand retail stores. But North American comics have effectively become the R&D department for a whole lot of higher-stakes media, from movies and television shows to videogames and Broadway musicals. Without periodical comic books, there's no The Walking Dead, no Thor, no The Dark Knight Rises, no Wonder Woman T-shirts or Spider-Man lunch boxes or Smallville soundtracks. The February issue of Green Lantern sold a mere 70,000 or so copies—but the franchise has also spawned a $150 million movie.

It's a little ironic, perhaps, that a medium obsessed with technologies that have the potential to transform and destroy—Phantom Zone projectors and repulsor rays, unstable molecules and cosmic treadmills—has at last bumped into such a technology right here on Earth-Prime. And just as you'd expect, it's a technology that could change the (entertainment) world. Some print comics might survive the shift, of course—most likely the ones that are satisfying as physical objects. Independent art-comics publishers have lately begun releasing exquisitely designed hardcover graphic novels, like David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. Meanwhile, artists and writers are beginning to think about how to create work specifically for a touchscreen tablet (instead of merely porting over print comics), just as they came up with new forms for the web. Eventually, that could develop into a whole new medium.

But the $4 stapled pamphlet? Sooner or later it's doomed, a vestigial holdover from the days when comic books were sold on spinning metal racks to kids. There's not much it can do that a digital equivalent can't do better. Our Wednesdays are numbered.

Illustration: Nathan Fox

Douglas Wolk (wiredmag@douglaswolk.com) is the author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.