For his first column on SNOW, creative director Remo Camerota introduces us to the advent of creator-owned digital “One Coin Comics” for all.

For all you comic and manga readers out there, here is something quite exciting. Interactive manga graphic novels/comics for the iPhone are now here. It’s still in its infancy, but something we’re going to see grow. Japan/US-based company Genkii — led by Ken Brady — is filling that gap with the release of its own comic reader app that allows you to download comics to read. Once you access the comic, you can change languages on the fly (English and Japanese, for the issue released so far), and there are game-style elements to interact with, and even director commentaries that you can flip to anytime.

For its first series, Genkii has released the first episode for free in an initiative to get as many people as possible to sample the story — a $1 fee will appear for future episodes. This at least gives you a chance to decide whether you like the content or not before paying. And the artwork for the one comic they have released so far is great — far from looking cheap, it’s a real pleasure to look at. If they keep the artwork at a world standard, it certainly looks like they’ll have a powerful tool on their hands.

One Coin Comics has only one release at the moment, and so at this stage you can only download the existing Foxfire story, and that’s it. Your first instinct is to look for another story, and so I think they would have benefited from a multi-release of say 3-5 titles at the launch of the app. Regardless, it is a great new beginning, and what’s even more interesting is that the company is open to submissions.This means that you can contact Ken Brady at Genkii and submit your own comic for release through the reader. You can then decide whether to give it away or sell it, at which point you will share in the revenue. This is a great platform for emerging and established artists to get their work out there directly on iTunes.

My own company Raven has done just that. Although I did not intend for this article to be a plug about my own work, but rather about the reader app, I do want to mention that our graphic novel titled SCAR will be one of the next releases from One Coin Comics, out later this month. This is especially great considering we worked for two years on this comic and now we can release it without any restriction or without losing any of the rights. The only thing we have to worry about in our title is the nudity levels for fear of iTunes censorship… But the future is here folks, where you can release your own comics straight to the iPhone.

Remo Camerota is a filmmaker, art director, comic creator, and the author of Graffiti Japan and the upcoming Drainspotting.