Marvel Announces Digital-Only & Augmented Reality Titles at SXSW

It seems that earlier this week, when Marvel used an image of Nova and the tagline "It's coming" to promote its House of Ideas panel at SXSW Interactive,  they were being quite literal. According to Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso's Twitter account, the publisher has just announced a digital-only Nova series, to be released through an "Augmented Reality" comics app under the Marvel banner. The series, along with at least one other, according to Comic Book Resources, will tie into the Avengers Vs. X-Men event. It will be written by Mark Waid with art by Stuart Immonen (the latter had already, of course, been predicted by many fans after having seen the Nova promo in Immonen's distinctive style). This project sounds very in-line with ideas that Waid had put forward recently on Twitter and in interviews, saying that the future of digital comics would come with animation, print/digital integration and digital-only books that are formatted for devices instead of print. C-Net, who have a sneak preview of the app, describe Marvel AR as "DVD special features for your comic book." In addition to digital-only content, it appears that tablets and smart phones (such as the iPad) that have external cameras can use those cameras to "see" a comic book page and be brought to that comic's special features. While the Nova book will be the first original book developed for the app, C-Net's preview shows Avengers Vs. X-Men #1, with images of a 3-D Iron Man popping off the page and flying away as well as Brian Michael Bendis offering commentary on the issue. The company is billing the AR app as a blending of print and digital comics to create "the future of the comics industry." The publisher screened a trailer for Avengers vs. X-Men at the panel, which can be seen below (the broken image link is something on yfrog's end, but if you , and which seems not much different than standard motion comics like the ones that both Marvel and DC have made available in the past--but according to Bleeding Cool's report, readers will also be able to remove "layers" from Marvel's Infinite Comics to look at the pencils and inks, not unlike what DC did with their digital-exclusive special editions of Flashpoint, except that it will be a bit more organic to the app instead of just something at the end of the book.