Exploring Stela's First Wave of New Digital Comics
Stela is a new smartphone app that offers original, exclusive comics optimized for the phone-reading experience. Chapters release every week, and you can read them all for a flat subscription fee of $5 a month. Reading the comics in Stela is smooth and intuitive. Each chapter is read via a downward scroll, and it totally works. Stela moves beyond Comixology's Guided View technology to offer comics that were born to be read on phones, and the result is extremely effective and, at its best, beautiful. However, there are some things about the app that I don't love.
All I want is to look at a simple list or menu of the titles available, but Stela doesn't want to give me that, just a sliding visual menu along the bottom of the screen. Also when I was reading a comic, I wanted to be reminded of the title, and there seems to be no way to bring that up without exiting the reading experience. But let's take a look at opening wave of comics available so far to help give you a sense of what Stela has to offer.