1. Quick Links Search
About Academics Executive Education Faculty and Research Centers Student Life
Libraries
AUC Venture Lab
Who We Are
Process
Startups
Mentors
Partners
Highlights
FAQ
Apply Now
Contact Us
AUC Web » Business » AUC Venture Lab » Kosh Comics, a New Approach to Reading Comics
Kosh Comics, a New Approach to Reading Comics
From left to right: Mostafa El-Saadani and Amr Hussein, co-founders of Koshk Comis
By Xiao Yu
Apps have become an integral part of our everyday life and going digital seems to be an inevitable trend for many industries. In the past. when people
talked about comics, they would usually imagine a “comic geek” burying his head into a thick comic book. However, Koshk Comics has challenged
this traditional reading habit by providing digital comics for comic lovers with easy access.
Koshk Comics is a mobile app for digital comics available on smart mobiles and tablets. Through the Koshk Comics website, authors and artists can
self-publish and distribute their artwork in digital markets, creating a platform for readers to read and purchase digital comics. The application devotes
to building a community to integrate comic readers and artists.
Background
It all started in 2014, Amr Hussein and his team decided to do a consumer entertainment product. As the founder and CEO of Colors Company,
Hussein wanted to create a flagship product that met the demand of the regional market. So they first started running several pilots on Facebook. In
June 2014, they released a 30-day digital comics series as a simple Facebook app, targeted for a general audience. The series contained different
entertainment tracks such as Digital Comics, Mini games, Riddles, and Trivia challenges. Launching the pilot in the month of Ramadan as daily
episodes reached 40,000 Facebook page fans and 10,000 app users (4,000 daily users).
Among all series of game tracks, the Digital Comics track was the hit with the most clicks by users. People have shown a great appetite for digital
comics, but there was no mature and specialized product to meet their need in the market. That inspired Amr and his team to fill the gap. “The
experiment has confirmed the willingness of “non-comics geeks” audience to read comics. Their problem was just that they could not find it. Amr
pointed out that for Comics readers: 1) they have limited places that sell printed comics. 2) In existing digital comics offerings, Arabic market is not
served by comics-specialized products. 3) Reading comics on A4 paper size on the text-book apps is rather inconvenient.
Development
Whlle analyzing the comics industry, they spotted the need at the other end which were artists who are involved in creating comics. They include
illustrators, colorists, inkers and writers. As Amr noted, “They are unable to find each other easily without a comics-industry customized online
community. They need a place to meet, collaborate, and create new comic books, they also need to save the huge upfront costs required to print,
market and distribute printed comics. I think that’s the service we can deliver with Koshk,” he added.
After analyzing both supply and demand sides in the industry, Koshk Comics was created as an open platform for both readers and artists. Koshk is
consumer centric, by designing the app the easiest way to enjoy visual works in any time: page size that fits the screen instead of traditional A4, safe
publishing by using Panel Forms instead of PDF, friendly and elegant interface, and regularly updated story episodes with professional and
independent art workers. On top of that, it helps artists to publish their creative artworks and visual stories online, which brings more exposure
to them. It supports thce reation of long comic books and graphic novels in episodes to facilitate the gradual authoring of content and provides
independent artists with cost-cutting methods.
Now Koshk has ten early adopter artists and seven community partners in six different countries. The BETA version launched the application on
Android and iPhone anhd as more than 1,000 users. The social media audience exceeds 50,000 fans on official accounts with increasing popularity.
The marketing campaign for comic readers will be starting in the first quarter of 2016. “We are adopting a gradual launch strategy of the content and
communities spreading across the first half of 2016, in order to secure the sustainability of new content promotions for app users”, said Hussein.
The next step Koshk wants to do is to furnish this online community to link artists, publishers and readers together. Artists can get easy access to
comic lovers, then those popular stories will have the attention from publishers who would be willing to get them published. Since those works already
have broad audience base online, once they get published as physical books, they are highly likely to be considered as best sellers. It aligns with
Koshk’s vision, “Our vision is to promote the regional comics industry throughout 2016, and create cross-culture integrations supporting worldwide
comics artists” said Hussein.
Koshk has started building its community by organizing the international CairoComix festival in October 2015, in cooperation with the French Institute
in Egypt, and the AUC Venture lab. It attracted more than two thousand visitors and more than five hundred artists from the Arab region, France, the