GoComics is bringing manga to your cell phone (one more way to while away the time while I’m driving) and for dinosaurs like me (“In my day, all we did was talk on our phones…”) they have a demo up on their website. It’s a nifty idea, and it would be even better if it actually worked. I’m not sure if it’s me or them, but I tried with Safari and Firefox and couldn’t get it to go. And yes, I have Flash/Java/whatever enabled.
Technical glitches aside, this comment in their press release bothered me a bit:
GoComics Books presents comics in a panel-by-panel format for quick viewing and a simple interface that offers a great user experience.
I know they’re just adapting the originals and “optimizing” them to work better on a cell phone, but it also loses one of the most important aspects of comics: the way the frames are arranged on the page, and the relationship of the panels to each other. To see what I mean, check out this series on timing in comics by Roadsong artist Joanna Estep. All that is lost on the cell phone.
I doubt that cell phones will ever replace dead-tree manga, but I hate to see the good stuff get diluted. Sigh.
There’s also a great series of articles on manga design at telophase’s livejournal (http://telophase.livejournal.com/113219.html#cutid1), and I particularly like this one on panel flow and page composition: http://telophase.livejournal.com/91840.html. It’s a really great illustration of what might be lost if you only see the cut-up components.