U.S. Publishers Work to Offer Comics on Phones

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on October 31, 2006 Sign up now!

by Trevor Soponis, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 10/31/2006

Encouraged by the growing cellphone manga market in Japan, U.S. publishers are moving to provide comics content to the millions of cellphone users in the U.S. market. While some technological obstacles remain, many observers see a U.S. market on the verge of significant growth in users, sales and artistic possibilities.

“A few years ago, there were a number of factors limiting putting comics on cellphones,” explains Jeff Webber, director of mobile content for uclick, the digital division of Universal Press Syndicate. Universal syndicates over 140 newspaper comic strips including Doonesbury, Garfield and The Boondocks. Citing cellphones’ small memory and poor quality color screens, Webber admits that when it came to viewing comics, “it just wasn’t a good user experience.”

“The U.S. has been, and continues to be, very far behind both Japan and Northern Europe in terms of the bells and whistles on mobile devices and their adoption,” says Todd Allen, a leading academic analyst of the digital comic market, who teaches at Columbia College Chicago. As a result of technological limitations, many comic publishers, including Marvel and DC, had limited their mobile phone offerings to little more than wallpaper and ringtones.

Yet in 2005, when most American cellphone carriers rolled out upgraded 3G cellphones for use on newly built networks, the technological capabilities changed and so did the business opportunities. In partnership with online comics aggregator GoComics, uclick was one of the first companies to offer traditional comic strip downloads to phones. While there were some conversion problems, the process adapting panel comics was fairly straightforward. Currently, GoComics is expanding its range of comics, which already includes dozens of well-known books including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Five Fists of Science, to include new material. Guilstein, a manga story never before published in the United States, is receiving its debut on cellphones through GoComics’ subscription service.

Manga publisher Tokyopop has been working hard to take the next step in providing digital comics content. Working with newly designed comics-reading software, Tokyopop now offers six of its print titles through a mobile subscription service. Titles include DramaCon, Princess Ai and Peach Fuzz. When users subscribe to the service for $4.99 a month, they receive daily installments of one of the six titles and gain complete access to the archives of each title. In a promising sign, over 100,000 users have taken advantage of a one-day free trial of the manga-reading software.

Adapting existing content to the medium is just the beginning, according to Jeremy Ross, Tokyopop’s director of new product development. Tokyopop is also planning to offer Mangapods, a new format featuring manga slide shows with music that is not yet available to consumers. Even more impressive is the company’s next technological step: made-for-mobile movies. With better software enabling more frames per minute, Ross says, "Images will be able to squash and stretch with a soundtrack that gives the experience an MTV feel."

Despite the enthusiasm, several serious technological issues need to be ironed out before comics on cellphones become commonplace. First and foremost, many areas of the country are without fast, reliable cellphone service. Secondly, despite the millions of 3G phones in use, most do not have any of the various types of software necessary for viewing comics. Third, different networks support different software, and different software provides different reading experiences. But with the progress of software development, spurred on by an entertainment industry focus on digital phone capabilities, it is likely these issues will be solved sooner rather than later.

Looking to the future, Webber sees a bright future for cellphone comics. “It’ll get faster, it’ll get easier, and it’ll always be affordable,” he says, and with overall technological improvements, “the reading experience will be richer.”

Beyond that is the opportunity to explore the medium artistically and provide original content designed specifically for cellphones. “When artists take advantage of the medium,” Webber says, “there are going to be some interesting storytelling options there. It’ll be a new creative product.”