Madefire has announced that it has closed deals with IDW, Top Cow, and Boom! comic companies to create digital only "Motion Books" on their various properties. For IDW the plan is to create the motion comics for Transformers, Star Trek, and My Little Pony. From what I can tell this isn't the same as the Motion Comics movies Marvel created with Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men and Warren Ellis' Iron Man Extremis arc a few years ago but a much cheaper, shorter alternative. Various comic companies have explored something along this lines with Marvel's Infinite Comics and Mark Waid's Thrillbent Comics but the "animation" is done with almost old school style of flipping pages. Hit up the Thrillbent link to see what I mean. Madefire's implementation though takes a full page comic page and adds animation within panels or entire page. Currently it seems the experience is limited to iPad and iPhone with the average comic issue price at $1.99. The first video below is the companies "Launch Film" with a few samples of animating IDW art while the second video shows off a little bit more of the implementation.
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