Mark Waid’s new digital comics initiative, Thrillbent, launched today. The first issue of Insufferable is up now. John Rogers has a post on the Waid’s blog on how to read the comics. In the browser you can just use the left and right arrow keys, or you can download a PDF and read it on an iPad.

Waid worked very hard to think of the best way to do comics digitally, and I like the results. As Rogers says in his post, they’re aping the page size of Warren Ellis’s Freakangels. Ellis is also a fellow who expends a lot of thought about the format, and I think it’s the right call. The whole comic fits nicely on a landscape iPad screen or in a desktop web browser, rather than being the height of a standard which would require scrolling. This way, the artist can be reasonably sure you’re taking in the entire page at once.

All in all, I like the idea and am excited to see where Thrillbent goes.