Madefire

» see madefire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

madefire was an english-language digital comics startup founded in 2011 with motion-comic ambitions. ben wolstenholme led it through to the end as ceo. liam sharp, the artist who would later draw green lantern for dc, was a co-founder. eugene walden was the engineer. the technical bet was motion books: comic pages with animated transitions and audio cues triggered by the reader's tap. publishers signed up. boom studios and archie shipped their own madefire-powered reader apps. so did scout and titan. the dedicated madefire app aggregated all of it.

on 7 april 2021 the company entered an assignment for the benefit of creditors with sherwood partners as the assignee. all staff were laid off. customers had until 30 april to download anything they had purchased before the back-end and the partner apps went dark. the archie app shut down on 28 april. by may the entire stack was gone, including the comics that publishers had only released through the madefire pipeline.

i read paper çizgi roman as a kid in turkey and never crossed into the dedicated digital-comics app stack as an adult. madefire was the kind of english-language product i would only encounter in tech press, not in a comics store. its closing matters less to me as a reader and more as the end-state of a particular bet about what digital comics could be once you took them off the printed page.

~ the chronicle ~

~ motion books ~

the motion books pitch was that traditional comic panels were artifacts of the print era and digital reading could be its own native format. madefire panels would slide in, parallax layers shifting and sound effects firing as you tapped. dave gibbons of watchmen drew sample books with the format. bill sienkiewicz also contributed work to the demo reels. the consumer behavior never followed. most digital comic readers wanted a clean reproduction of the print page, scrollable or paginated, and a deep catalog. comixology shipped that. webtoon shipped the vertical-scroll variant for korean-style serial comics. madefire's mid-position, somewhere between comic-as-it-was and animation-as-it-could-be, never grew an audience that justified the production cost per book.

~ the partner apps ~

madefire's bigger business was b2b. publishers who did not want to build their own reader app could license madefire's pipeline and ship a branded reader. archie comics and boom studios both ran branded apps on it. scout and titan also rode the same back-end. that was good revenue while it lasted, but it tied each publisher's continued availability on mobile to madefire's continued solvency. when madefire entered abc on 7 april 2021, every one of those publisher apps lost its back-end at the same time. customers who had bought issues through those apps had a three-week window to download their library or lose access.

~ what came after ~

the comics that were only released as motion books are the part that did not survive in a portable form. you can still read most of those titles in a standard print or print-replica digital edition somewhere else, but the motion-book versions with the animated panels and the audio cues are gone unless you downloaded the raw files before 30 april 2021 and held on to them. the format itself did not outlive the company. nobody else picked up motion comics as a commercial product after madefire wound down.

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