The thing I kept hitting while testing Comic Scry: scanning needs two hands, and a box of comics needs two hands, and you only have two hands. You’re at a shop, or a show, or someone’s garage, holding a stack — and you want to know whether you already own the one on top before you pay for it again. Put the stack down, unlock the phone, find the app, tap search… and the moment’s gone.
So 1.0.9 adds Siri. Now you just ask.
”Hey Siri, check my Comic Scry collection”
Say that, and Siri asks “Which comic?” You say a title — “Tales to Astonish 34” — and it answers out loud: “Yes, you have one copy, from 1962.” Or “No, that one isn’t in your collection yet.” Then it offers to check another, so you can run a whole stack without looking at the screen once.
That’s the one I built it for. The rest came along with it:
- “What’s my collection worth?” · “What’s my most valuable comic?” · “How many do I have?” — answered out loud.
- “Scan a comic in Comic Scry” opens the camera. Better: map that one to the Action Button, and the next book is one press away — no “Hey Siri” at all.
All of it reads your collection right on the phone. No account, nothing sent anywhere.
The seam: Siri can’t take a comic name straight
Here’s the part that took the real work.
The obvious design is one phrase: “Hey Siri, do I have Tales to Astonish 34 in Comic Scry.” It doesn’t work. Siri’s App Shortcuts can’t reliably capture an open-ended name inside the trigger phrase — feed it a comic title and it tends to give up and hand the whole thing to ChatGPT instead.
So it’s two steps on purpose: a fixed trigger Siri recognizes every time (“check my Comic Scry collection”), then a spoken “Which comic?” that opens real dictation — which can take any title, issue, or mangled-homophone version of a series name. (Siri hears “ElfQuest” as “elf quest,” “L quest,” and a few other things; the matching shrugs that off.)
Small thing, but it’s the difference between a feature that works at a noisy comic show and a demo that only works in a quiet room. I shipped the one that works in the room you’d actually use it in.
About the “what’s it worth” answers
When you ask Siri what your collection’s worth, the number it reads is the same one the app shows — current eBay asking prices, what people are listing those books for. Asks run higher than final sales, so it’s a market signal, not a sale total. Same number, just spoken.
1.0.9 is rolling out now. If you’ve got a collection saved, try it on the next box — and tell me where Siri mishears you, because that’s the next thing to sharpen.
— Adam