InkyPen

» see inky-pen.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Nintendo eShop has never launched in Turkey. A Switch bought in Istanbul works perfectly well and its owner buys from a British or American account instead, so a service described as launching "worldwide in most regions" is, read from here, a list of countries you have to go and check. InkyPen was on that list and not in my part of it.

What it was: an all-you-can-read comics and manga subscription that ran on a games console. It launched on 17 December 2018 at $7.99 a month, built by a small Norwegian company of the same name in Bergen, working out of an office it shared with the games studio Rain Games.

It was the first comic subscription service exclusive to the Switch, and for a long stretch one of the only non-game media applications Nintendo had allowed onto the machine at all, with Hulu for company. The developers had shown it at GDC in March 2018, nine months before it shipped.

The premise made more sense than it sounds. The Switch has a screen about the size of a trade paperback and a kickstand to prop it up, and millions of owners who already read and watched things on it in bed. The platform was also closed enough that nothing else could get in. ComiXology lived on tablets and phones; InkyPen had a console to itself for seven years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a comics shop inside a console ~

The app grew the way a tiny team's app grows, slowly and in response to complaints. Update 1.2.0 on 16 March 2020 added vertical reading, which is what you need for anything drawn for a phone. A deal with Kodansha USA on 27 April 2020 brought licensed manga onto the console. Later that year InkyPen's reader turned up inside somebody else's video game, when Rain Games and Studio Foglio put the Girl Genius archive into a game adaptation and made those comics free to read in the app as well.

The catalog was the whole business and also the ceiling. Valiant, Dynamite, IDW, Titan, Humanoids, Archie, Dark Horse, Andrews McMeel and Papercutz were in it, along with a long tail of webcomics and independents. Marvel and DC never were. Both of them had their own subscription services by then, which left InkyPen selling a serious library with the two names a casual buyer would search for missing from it.

~ the last month ~

On 2 June 2025 Nintendo published its compatibility list for the Switch 2, and InkyPen was one of the few applications marked unavailable on it. On 18 November 2025 the company launched a Steam version, opening with a graphic novel adaptation of Black Mirror. That is a company trying to climb off a platform that had stopped carrying it, and it had four weeks to do it in.

On 17 December 2025, the seventh anniversary of the Switch launch, InkyPen announced that it had filed for bankruptcy and that "the business and its operations will cease immediately". The servers were switched off by the end of business on Friday 19 December. Valve pulled the Steam application and subscriptions canceled themselves. Anyone owed money had until 16 January 2026 to file a claim with a bankruptcy administrator in Bergen.

~ what a bankruptcy takes with it ~

None of what you had read stayed. A subscription reader is permission to open files on somebody else's server, so when the server went off the shelf went with it, the free Girl Genius archive and the per-territory Kodansha licenses included. The difference between this and a comic shop closing is that a comic shop closing leaves the comics in your house.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »