Sweden Fantomen releases a new digital comic book series

Will the digital comic be the next major area of growth in the comics industry? The world wide digital comic book market size is forecast to increase by USD 1.65 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 5.5% between 2024 and 2029. In 2018, digital comic book sales in North America alone was only at 100 million.

If you add the uncertainty of Diamond Comic Distributors and the increase of tariffs and postage rates, surely digital comics could become a more cost effective means for some fans?

Fantomen has now announced a new digital comic book series. The comic is available on both the Flipp and Readly platforms.

This is great news as Phantom publishers try and reach potential new and hopefully younger readers. At this stage Lightning Strikes has released a digital only Tasq Force magazine which includes The Phantom, Popeye and other characters. Mad Cave Studios, Fantomen, and Frew also currently released digital versions of their regular hard copy comic series.

The first issue has a mixture of classic newspaper and classic Fantomen created stories in "Alexander's Cup" by Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy and "The Ghost Pirates" by Norman Worker and Jaime Vallvé. The Sunday story "Alexander's Cup" is printed in red, black and white and the Team Fantomen story "The Ghost Pirates" will be in colour as when it was last printed in Fantomen 1/2020.

From what we understand, King Features stories do not cost publishers extra in license fees so they are an obvious inclusion in this magazine. We expect there is a reason why specific Team Fantomen stories will be printed alongside them.

At the time of publishing this article, Readly offers a digital subscription price of 149 sek ($24AUD, 15USD/Eu and 1,280INR) per month which gives you access to the two Fantomen titles (Phantoms Treasure and regular) plus 8,000 other digital magazines.

Flipp is the digital platform service that you automatically get when you subscribe to the printed magazine. If your interested in the digital subscriptions only, the price is cheaper at 79 sek per month ($13AUD, 8USD/Eu and 680INR). We believe that this magazine will be made available for all subscribers of Flipp and Fantomen magazine subscribers.

A huge thanks goes to Kristian Hellesund and other fans who have notified us of this information. Will you be buying a digital subscription? We are on the look out for someone to review Fantomen comics for the Chronicle Chamber platform, if you are interested in reviewing both magazines ongoing, please contact us.