It turns out their personal brand carried as much weight as Amazon’s corporate brand when it came to luring launch partners to the platform, including the critical “Big Two” (Marvel and DC) of the comics publishing world. Sales leader Marvel Comics is bringing one of its largest licensed digital comics catalogs in recent years to the new platform, and all publishers are making both frontlist and backlist available on a pay-to-download basis.

“We sold a lot of digital comics for those publishers and we always tried to operate in a forthright and transparent way,” says Steinberger. “A lot of the same people are still in leadership in those companies. When we told them what we were doing and showed them some of the work we had done on DSTLRY publications, they were pretty excited to come on board.”

Mosher says he expects additional publishers will sign on as momentum grows. Steinberger says creators and self-publishers will eventually be able to sell their work on the site as well.

As the branding suggests, Neon Ichiban isn’t just about American comics. Mosher and Steinberger say that Asian manga and manwa are going to be a big area of focus, unsurprising considering how digital has taken over that industry. Kodansha, a leading publisher of manga in both Japan and North America, is also one of the launch partners.

“We have an aspiration to bring readers of all the global styles of sequential storytelling art together to experience great comics,” says Steinberger. “We’re able to use modern tools to present personalized recommendations and bridge the gaps, so everyone can see what’s most interesting to them.”

Mosher also emphasized the importance of having current material from the industry’s top publishers visible on a single platform, given the chaos that has engulfed the comic book distribution system in recent months.

“One of the things we learned from comiXology is that digital can be a big benefit to the whole industry, because our data showed so many first-time comic readers on digital go on to buy comics in print at local retailers,” he says. “We look forward to making print customers for the entire industry. We are a print publisher ourselves, and that’s still an important part of our business.”

One other lesson from comiXology is that, even with the might of Amazon behind them, digital sales of comics on a download-to-own basis hit a ceiling of about 15% of the total print market. Sure, people want to read comics, but they also want to collect them, hunt for rare variants, get them signed, and sell them.

DSTLRY developed technology that enables exactly these features, which debuted on their proprietary marketplace in 2024. Now Neon Ichiban is making that functionality available to all publishers.

“We register each purchase with an edition number, and our back end transfers that edition from user to user,” explains Steinberger. “People can see who owned it, who sold it to who, whether it got signed or remarqued. We don’t use any kind of blockchain or NFTs for that. It’s unnecessary. We ensure the provenance, so we avoid the issues that crushed the whole NFT thing.”

The resale marketplace allows creators to supplement their income by charging for sketches and signatures on digital just as they do on physical comics. It also includes opportunities for the original publisher and creators to get a share of the revenues when books change hands.

The Neon Ichiban team hopes those features, combined with their experience, industry relationships and extensive launch-day partner lineup, can help their new project gain traction in a multilayered digital comics space that includes international players like Webtoon, new subscription-based services like Global Comix, and what’s left of comiXology, now largely subsumed into Amazon’s Kindle and facing mounting complaints from users over lack of support.

“Once people see what we’re doing, we expect to add new partners, new benefits for readers and creators and other enhancements,” says Steinberger. He and Mosher urge people interested in news and notifications about Neon Ichiban to sign up for the company’s newsletter.