Panel from Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted by artist Paco Diaz Panel from Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted by artist Paco Diaz Panel from Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted by artist Paco Diaz Panel from Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted by artist Paco Diaz Panel from Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted by artist Paco Diaz Cover image for Wolverine: Japan's Most Wanted Cover image for Iron Man: Final Frontier

Today, Marvel Comics debuted its latest series, Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted, and announced its next comic exclusively to Wired: Iron Man: Fatal Frontier, written by Al Ewing and Kieron Gillen, and illustrated by Lan Medina. But don’t look for either one in your local comics shop. They’re the latest titles in Marvel’s Infinite Comics imprint, a digital-first line created specifically for mobile devices.

Unlike most digital comics, which are converted from the traditional printed comic page, Infinite Comics are designed to be displayed and read on screens. Their name evokes the “infinite canvas,” a term coined by cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud to describe how digital comics could operate in a space unconstrained by traditional borders. And it’s an apt reference: these are comics that truly feel native to the digital format. There are no oddly displayed vertical panels or awkward semi-animation; Infinite Comics are true to comics through and through, even as they employ cinematic transitions and play with pacing in ways that would be cumbersome–if not outright impossible–on the printed page.

Wired spoke with Gillen and Ewing, as well as Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted writers Jason Aaron and Jason Latour about what it’s like to write comics for the screen, and what digital comics mean for the future of the medium.

For many of the creators, writing for a digital canvas took some adjustment. “It’s a lot to wrap your head around, at least initially, As comic book artists and writers, we’re taught to view the page as a whole, and write with page flips in mind,” said Latour. “Things are a lot less linear in a [printed] comic book. You’re always asking the audience to enter this sort of bond with you, not to cheat and look ahead, because no matter what they do, the future’s always there on the right-hand page.”

In digital comics, however, readers only see one panel at a time as they click forward, creating the illusion that time is unfolding one tap at a time. It also gives writers the chance to surprise readers in ways no print comic could. When you have to click through a panel at a time, Ewing explained, “every single panel can be a cliffhanger.”

Pacing is an ongoing challenge for comics writers: breaking a scene into many panels in order to display more details can slow the plot to a crawl and eat up valuable space. Infinite Comics offers an alternative: decompression that doesn’t sacrifice economy of storytelling. Some are as simple as page-turns that alter only the text in a caption, while the image remains constant. “Infinite has a lot of ways of efficient and interesting storytelling in terms of the people making the comic,” said Gillen, “and also in terms of time, budget, and space. It’s a lot of bang for buck.”

“It largely boils down to the illusion of time or action,” agreed Latour. So, for example, Wolverine being able to pop his claws, or play tricks with flashing lights: things that would take up a tremendous amount of space in a comics page, whereas when panels occur one at a time, it feels a little more fluid.”

But despite the tricks and transitions, Aaron called Infinite Comics a perfect introduction to comic books, an art form that can often be challenging to newcomers. “[Comics storytelling] kind of becomes second language to a lot of us and we never really have a problem deciphering a printed comics page, even as layouts have gotten more wild and exotic over the years… What’s great about Infinite Comics is that it guides you through that, one panel at a time, so that’s never a problem. Anyone could pick this up and read it and follow it.”

As for the future of digital comics, all four writers agree that there’s a lot of new ground to be covered. Althought Infinite Comics is currently built on the engine of digital distributor ComiXology, Gillen said the future of the medium likely lies in something “solely built for the possibilities of this [digital format]. I can definitely see the equivalent of a next-gen comics engine in terms of what you can do with the manipulation of juxtaposed imagery, which is what comics is. So there’ll probably be an engine war, of engines that can be used to drive your comics technology, the same way they have in games.”