Just days before the Saturday release of Apple's iPad, there's confirmation that the much-anticipated media slate will feature a Marvel Comics app developed by ComiXology.

While noting that the Marvel application doesn't yet appear in the iPad's App Store, Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times says he's "very impressed and excited" by what he sees: "This underscores a sentiment that everybody in comics has felt ever since rumors of an Apple tablet became tangible: that the device would finally make the experience of reading comics digitally into something that’s practical, enjoyable, and most importantly deliver the story in a way that feels like a comic book."

David Pogue of The New York Times describes the Marvel app as "brilliant in its vividness and panel-by-panel navigation," while BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin starts with "spectacular" and "game-changing" before getting a little more specific: "crisp, lucid art, the ability to navigate frame-by-frame, rendering spoilers down the page obsolete."

But back to Ihnatko, who devotes the most amount of space to the app, and provides the most details.

"If you’re a purist who needs to see the whole page at once, you can hold the iPad in portrait mode and flip through the story as you would with a paper comic," he writes. "You can zoom in and out as you wish, but though the iPad screen is smaller than a standard comic page (I measure it as 7.5”, compared to a comic’s 10”) it’s still crisp and readable when scaled down. Turn the iPad on its side, and a new viewing mode becomes available. In iBooks, tapping the left and right sides of the screen turns pages. In the Marvel app, it 'moves the camera position' forward and backwards through the story, snappily zooming in and out through the 'units' of the page, highlighting moments of dialogue or action."

Developing ...