American comic book fans live for Wednesdays. That’s the day the new issues arrive. Every major American comic book publisher uses a single distributor, Diamond, to ship boxes of their latest releases to roughly 2,200 comics retail stores across the country. The shop owners—or their minions—put that week’s crop of Batman or X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the shelves, and then the fans arrive. A lot of them go to the same store every week, where they have a “pull list” on file, books they’ve asked to be set aside so they’ll never miss a single pulse-pounding issue. It’s a tradition.

To be more specific, it’s a dying tradition. The Wednesday crowd is the old-school audience, collectors who are willing to shell out $3 or $4 for a stapled-together pamphlet that they’ll put in a plastic bag with acid-free cardboard and store in a long white box. Those customers have been trickling away for years.

But that’s OK, because about two decades ago publishers picked up a second category of customers. These newer readers generally prefer the classier term graphic novel and would rather buy their comics as squarebound books. They might pick up a stack of them five or six times a year, rather than chasing issues every week. That was just fine with publishers, especially the industry’s 8,000-pound super-gorillas Marvel (owned by Disney) and DC Comics (owned by Time Warner). For them, graphic novels meant that decades’ worth of back catalog could generate income again and provide an entrée into bookstores.

A third group of readers has come along even more recently: Internet- savvy young fans who download pirated versions of everything. At first the comics industry didn’t pay much attention to this new generation. Unlike the music and movie businesses, comics experienced an unprecedented boom in the mid-2000s, thanks to the rise of graphic novels, as well as manga from Japan. Besides, the fan-made scans of new issues that showed up online, usually just a few hours after the print versions arrived in stores, were kind of a hassle to download and read on a computer. The unwieldy nature of the whole process made the print-comics industry feel as though digital comics, legit or otherwise, weren’t worth the trouble.

Then Apple introduced the iPad. Its touchscreen is just a bit smaller than those staple-bound pamphlets and looks a lot cooler. For comics fans, the new device was a lot like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen: naked, glowing, and powerful beyond comprehension. Now the comics industry is slowly, agonizingly, belatedly backing into digital distribution, but with a deeply unusual goal in mind: to push digital customers toward brick-and-mortar stores for long enough to make sure the business can survive its forthcoming, unavoidable mutation.

Comics, as it happens, look magnificent on tablets. But no one in the comics industry is really ready for what that magnificence implies. Sales of periodical comics are falling, and there’s no iTunes Store equivalent to sell them digitally—no single place where readers can buy all the comics they’d ever want, old and new, to read on their tablets. (Fans can still download them in pirated form, of course.)

David Steinberger, cofounder of comiXology, would like to change that. Launched in 2007, comiXology was initially an online pull-list management service designed to be used by both retailers and readers. In 2009, it introduced a digital-comics reader for the iPhone, with just 80 titles from independent publishers (in comics-speak, “independent” means neither Marvel nor DC). Many similar apps appeared around that time, but comiXology’s came with a nifty feature that automatically jumped from panel to panel, making the most of the iPhone’s small screen.

In the past two years, though, Marvel, DC, and Image (publisher of The Walking Dead series) all tapped comiXology to create branded apps for the iPhone and iPad. The company essentially built digital stores so the big publishers didn’t have to. That move turned comiXology into the Hulk in a room full of Daredevils. It wasn’t part of the original plan, but comiXology’s history of working closely with brick-and-mortar stores on pull lists gave it an edge with publishers. “We were in the weirdest position of any digital-comics company,” Steinberger says. “We were already connected with the retailer.”

So comiXology’s tech was able to satisfy the publishers’ main criterion for a digital presence: Don’t mess with the stores. Unfortunately for fans, though, that means that Marvel and DC readers can buy shockingly few new single issues for download—it’s mostly classics and compendia. Releasing new comics digitally, goes the theory, would erode the shops’ customer base. So sacrosanct is this tenet that in November 2010, when Marvel accidentally released the second issue of Ultimate Comics Thor digitally a week before it was supposed to hit stores, the publisher pulled the issue and temporarily locked the copies of everyone who’d already bought it.

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