Electricomics app frees graphic fiction from the boundaries of the page

Readers have been promised a revolution in graphic storytelling ever since the dawn of the internet, but this week's launch of Alan Moore's Electricomics offers the first glimpse of a new beginning for digital comics.

Fans have been reading comics on electronic devices in increasing numbers over recent years, but until now publishers have been content to replicate the experience of the printed page. The cutting edge of innovation has been Comixology's "guided view" technology, which blows up each panel and progresses to the next at the tap of your tablet screen.

Now Moore, arguably the finest proponent of the graphic novel form, has taken digital comics to a new level. Readers can download a free app from iTunes that gives access to the first issue of four separate comics, each one unfolding in its own peculiar way.

Moore's explores a recurring theme that he first tackled in , asking what happens when our childhood heroes grow up?

This melancholy story looks back at Winsor McCay's , a newspaper strip that began in 1905 charting a boy's adventures in dreamland. Moore reimagines - beautifully evoked in artwork from Colleen Doran - as a bleak, friendless place, where the American dream has been drained of colour by prohibition and the Wall Street crash.

All this would be quite enough to whet the appetite of any Moore fan, but the technology employed to move through the story is truly groundbreaking. As the reader taps on each panel the scene shifts and the dialogue fades away. Just like in a dream.