This breathless account of and stolid railing against selling comics on iTunes from May seems rather quaint now, doesn’t it?

Things change pretty fast around here.

ALSO: Something that will probably seem equally dated in six months: Jim Shelley’s rundown of the various tablet rumors out there.

A stunned world woke up to the news that now you can read Marvel Comics on your iPhone, via the four platforms best known for their comics offerings: Comixology, iVerse, Panelfly and Scrollmotion. A story on Marvel.com talks to EVP, Marvel Digital Media Ira Rubenstien.

Marvel digital comics availability on the iPhone Apps system joins the recently announced venture offering individual classic Marvel comics for download on Sony’s PSP device and, of course, the pioneering Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited subscription service that launched nearly two years ago and features an ever-expanding selection of over 7,000 comics!

“As technology grows, the ways fans can consume our comics must expand as well,” Rubenstein said. “We’re very cognizant of that and will continue to explore avenues to offer the widest variety of fun ways for fans to read Marvel comics. Stay tuned for announcements coming soon regarding not only more iPhones apps, but ways to enjoy Marvel digital comics on other devices!”

Although what’s available on Scrollmotion wasn’t readily apparent, Bleeding Cool had a rundown of the comics available:

Comixology: (71 issues, $1.99 each)

Age of Apocalypse #1–6
Astonishing X-Men #1–24 (Full Whedon Cassaday run)
Captain America #1–30 (Brubaker, Epting)
Marvel Zombies #1–5
X-23 #1–6

iVerse: (37 issues, $1.99 each)

Age of Apocalypse #1–6
Amazing Spider-Man #519–524
Astonishing X-Men #1–12
Captain America #1–6 (Brubaker, Epting)
Invincible Iron Man #1–6
X-23 #1–6

Panelfly (84 issues, $0.99 each)

Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #1-25 (Lee, Ditko)
Amazing Spider-Man #519-524
Astonishing X-Men #1-24
Invincible Iron Man #1-16
X-23 #1-6
Age Of Apocalypse #1-6

Obviously there is some overlap, but also exclusives for each.

Most interesting, if the email we’ve gotten since the announcement is any indication, is the pricing: Comixology and iVerse have priced comics at $1.99, a dollar more than their usual offerings. Panelfly is sticking with 99 cents.

Kinda speaks for itself.The old order changeth,

While the iPhone is rapidly becoming the new hotness as a platform for comics distribution, hold on a sec.AT&T still sucks donkey balls and swamp water as their crap network can’t keep up with the demand for bandwidth:

Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user.

“They don’t even realize how much data they’re using,” said Gene Munster, a senior securities analyst with Piper Jaffray.

The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.

This explains why our World War game just spins and spins, doesn’t it?

There were a couple more iPhone comics announcement in our inbox this morning, bringing the approximate number of iPhone related comics announcements this week to 5,684 or so. Rather than run them all we’ll refer you to ICv2’s brief overview of the field which notes that the number of companies offering comics on iPhones has more than doubled in the past two months. And

It’s been 60 days since we updated our directory of mobile comics content (primarily for the iPhone, see “Mobile Comics Directory—Update #4”), and the number of titles available (most of which include multiple issues) has gone from 105 to 207 in that time. 

Manga writer/editor/NYTimes best selling author Jake Forbes looks at the rush but takes a more critical eye with Four Challenges for Digital Comics to Overcome:

Digital comics, in their present state, are require too much compromise. The market is fragmented, with some being device specific (iPhone and a few Kindle titles) or locked to the publisher’s site (like all of VIZ or Marvel’s offerings). Offerings are still slim, with poor representation of the classics (Sandman, Maus, Bone, Blankets, anything Tezuka, and too many others to list). And as for offering an alternative to buying print comics, digital isn’t even close. At this point, it’s hard to even fathom today’s digital offerings making up a proper “collection.”

Among Forbes’ other observations — webcomics and manga are thus far very underserved on the iPhone.

MyRomanceStory is a division of Arrow Publishing that has been turning out romance comics for a while now — unspectacularly, but they made it this far, so something must have worked. A check of their website reveals these sorts of storylines, just so you know where we’re coming from:

Volume 101. Surprised By Love 
The best surprises come wrapped in love…
Featuring:
 Whitewater Rapture 
Could Wolf and Annie survive the consequences of one night of wild passionate love in the Canadian wilderness? 

Wildfire 
David was determined to have Ashley despite her bitterness toward men. But it took a dangerous forest fire and a midnight visit to finally break down her resistance.

A couple of press releases just out from the company. First, they have hired Valencia Wood as Director of Media Development to help “spearhead Arrow’s expanding publishing offerings.” Wood has worked on a variety of multimedia projects in film, music, and so on and hopes to get MyRomanceStory’s works out into other media.

Wood’s first move, via another press release, is to put their romance graphic novels on iPhones. This is one of the best press releases we’ve read in some time! Instead of the boring story of new content for mobile devices, price points blah blah, it’s a story of frustrated desire, mixed signals and finally…union.

“The iPhone opens up an exciting platform for readers to experience our romance novels,” says Pat White, CEO Arrow Publications, LLC, the publisher of MyRomanceStory.com. “The colors are vibrant and the text is easy to read.”

However, getting these stories up was frustrating.

At times, MyRomanceStory editors suffered the same mixed signals as their fictional heroines since they were never sure what Apple wanted. Form emails would indicate that there was a problem with the submission, but wouldn’t specify the text, image, or even the panel. As White explains, “We present stories of couples falling in love. That involves romantic and necessary intimate scenes. We spent a lot of time editing and re-editing. If only we could have spoken to someone at Apple to understand exactly what changes they wanted.”

“We were sensitive to Apple’s range of readers so we submitted edited versions targeting what we thought was a general audience,” Managing Editor, Tom King, adds. “But although we edited out some of the love scenes and text, we still got rejections.”

Once Apple launched its ratings system and got over the initial bottleneck of submissions, Arrow noticed a faster turnaround for its Apps approval.

It was clear that although Arrow and Apple were experienced in their respective fields, preparing content for worldwide digital delivery was a challenge. Content creators wanted specific feedback while Apple, working with a large, diverse group of developers, often required a one-size-fits-all approach. Through this entire process, Apple, too experienced the pains of becoming a movie distributor, music distributor and bookseller.

Romance fans can go to the iTunes App Store and search by keywords “myromancestory” or “romance story” to find the Arrow titles.

Wasn’t that great? Please, marketing people, let’s put the drama back into press releases!

If only someone would put comics on iPhone! How convenient it would be! Wait, they have? NBM is the latest publisher to join the gold rush:

NBM Publishing is proud to announce partnering with Panelfly, the newly launched iPhone app that’s bringing the best graphic novels direct to you… instantly! 

Panelfly allows you to read your favorite graphic novels as the creators intended; you get full-page views, automatic panel navigation and more! You can purchase your comics using your iTunes account; tap the screen twice, and you’ll immediately have one of the world’s best graphic novels right in your hands. 

NBM titles now available include the sold-out smash BROWNSVILLE by writer Neil Kleid, Jesse Lonergan’s powerful romantic drama FLOWER AND FADE, Swedish sensation Naomi Nowak’s UNHOLY KINSHIP, Rick Geary’s award-winning LINDBERGH CHILD and Shane White’s NORTH COUNTRY. All of these by authors NBM is publishing new titles from this fall. More titles will be added throughout the fall. 

Each of these NBM graphic novels is available on your iPhone for $6.95 to $9.95, less than the paperbacks. Go straight to iTunes or to www.panelfly.com. 

Stay tuned for further announcements of partnerships between NBM and leading E-Book and mobile download sites.

“It’s clear this is the future where readers increasingly have a choice as to how they want to read their comics,” said NBM publisher Terry Nantier, “and we consider ourselves purveyors of graphic novels, not pushers of print publications. Any way you want a quality, engrossing novel-length comic, we’ll make that available, whether print or electronic.” 

For further information, please contact our publicist, Marc Mason: marcmasonnbm@gmail.com.