Japan's Mobile Comic Frenzy

Mobile comics seem to be growing in popularity worldwide, bouyed by better screen resolutions and the growing number of comic creators experimenting with the form. Further growth in the market might come from the increasing sales success for mobile comics (ketai) in Japan, a country which has already successfully exported manga print comics worldwide.

Reuters reported today that the Japanese love of mobile comics - which is already huge - could grow further with the arrival of Apple's iphone next month. Analysts claim the device's touch-screen will make it easier and more appealing to read comics on handsets.

With the number of mobile phone subscribers close to 108 million, or 85 percent of Japan's population, carriers there are already finding e-mail, music downloads and web surfing hugely popular, and are looking for new opportunities to make money in a highly competitive market - and that includes comics.

Mobile Comics led the size of the Japanese mobile publication market to double in the last business year to 22 billion yen ($204 million), according to Internet and media research firm Impress R&D, almost three times bigger than the e-publication market for PCs.

"Until now, users had been extensively using mobile phones for email," Shinko Securities analyst Tomohiko Okugawa told Reuters. "Now that's shifting to games and comics ... This is the area that's going to be very interesting."

"The importance of content has been growing," agreed Toshitake Amamiya, general manager of telecom KDDI's content and media division. "It's crucial to pursue what we can do in this market where each adult always carries around a mobile phone and uses it as a life tool."

But mobile comics on mobile aren’t just proving popular in Japan. Putting on my hat as Managing Editor of comics-on-mobile service ROK Comics, we've found that translations of strips first published on ROK Comics for China have proven very popular in recent months.

While selling comics on mobile to traditional comics readers is, surprisingly, a hard sell - it's hard to beat the beauty and versatility of the printed comic page either online or on mobile - we are finding that mobile comics are a new, wider audience. Comics fans who have always read newspaper cartoons but never set foot in a comic shop may prove the key to making mobile comics a success.

Webcomics creators argue a hardcore fan set of a couple of thousand readers is enough to turn a profit online (largely through sales of strip-related merchandise such as collections, t-shirts etc.) so the potential revenues are strong. What we’re finding is that mobile comics are popular even in countries where there is no traditional print-based or web comic industry, and mobile reaches far more people than even web comic creators reach via PC delivery.

ROK Comics provides both a platform for licensed comic content including Andy Capp, Roy of the Rovers and Garth, and the tools for independent comic creators to upload their own comics, promoting their characters on mobile using a comic creator tool which also enable web blog and web site publication. The sale of downloads and WAP page views are credited to creators' accounts, with profits on sales shared equally between ROK and the creator.

Delivering comics on mobile in the West is achievable - we’ve been doing that for over a year - but creators and publishers do need to take on board the creative challenges imposed by small screen delivery and be aware it's still early days for the form outside countries like Japan where mobile comics have been around for quite some time.

• More about creating comics for mobile on the ROK Comics web site

Lloyd in Highgate

Kickback and V for Vendetta artist David Lloyd is giving a talk at the Highgate Library in London at 7.15pm on Wednesday, 25th June. Admission is fre but to book a place call 020 8489 8772

David will be talking about his latest work Kickback, and the experience of being a graphic novelist.

Highgate Library is at 1 Shepherd Hill, London N6 5QJ

Admission is free and refreshments will be available.

Read More Calvin and Hobbes, Government Urges

(with thanks to Matthew Badham for the initial lead): The British government says young boys should be encouraged to read Calvin and Hobbes and comic-book annuals such as the Dandy and Beano to get them into the reading habit young and help them to keep up with girls' at school.

That's the message from government adviser Chris Brown, reported in several newspapers including The Times, a retired head teacher and author of Primary Boys into Books, a new reading report commissioned by the Government that's part of a £5 million government scheme to get more boys reading sooner and trying new books.

Jeff Smith's Bone: The Great Cow Race, Kazu Kibuishi's Flight, Michael Carroll's Sakkara (New Heroes), David Petersen's Mouse Guard title Fall 1152 and Art Spiegelman's It Was A Dark and Silly Night are just some of the comic or comic related titles in the extensive reading list, along with Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes collection, Scientific Progress Goes Boink.

The report, part of the "Riveting Reads" series published under the auspices of the School Library Association, includes many comic-style or graphic books in a list of the Top 200 new works he has drawn up for 5 to 11-year-old boys, along with novels about espionage, ghosts and aliens -- but not ‘The Famous Five’, ‘Just William’ or even the ever-popular Roald Dahl books.

Neil Gaiman's Coraline, Mirrormask and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish are among the selected novels, as

Brown argues such books had great appeal for many boys and could be of enormous educational benefit because they stimulated visual responses to the pictures as well as intellectual responses to the words, he said. He regretted that schools and parents dismissed them too often as not being "proper books".

Statistics show that boys are ten percentage points behind girls in English at Key Stage 2. Ministers hope that better reading habits among boys will help close the gender gap. A recent evaluation of Every Child a Reader (ECaR), a programme of intensive literacy support for children who are struggling, shows that it is possible to close the reading gap between young boys and girls.

• The booklist is available exclusively online on the SLA website as a searchable database and also as a downloadable PDF version.
• More on Boys into Books can be found at: http://www.sla.org.uk/boys-into-books-overview.php
• Government research on early reading can be found at: http://www.aft.org/pubsreports/american_educator/spring2003/catastrophe.html

Tube Surfing: 23 June 2008

• Comics writer Jason Cobley is a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show The Learning Curve at 8.30pm tonight, Monday 23rd June, discussing using Classical Comics' Shakespeare books in the classroom with the legendary Libby Purves. "I'm not sure whether to be excited, terrified, or just cool as a cucumber," says Jason, author of Bulldog Empire and one of Britain's best known indie comic publishers.

• Waterstones is celebrating 25 years of Terry Partchett's Discworld in many ways, one of which is an interview with the celebrated author by Neil Gaiman. Terry talks candidly about his career, how he is now an honorary Brownie (for writing a proper girl in a book, The Wee Free Men. "I've got a woggle and everything..."), his battle with early onset Alzheimer's, and his approach to writing. "planning. 'Planning, planning, planning," he reveals. "It's more like those guys in the desert who pick up a handful of loam, or sand, and taste it, and they know whether there's any oil nearby.
"It's the same thing with writing: you can tell where the legs are in an idea but don't know where the idea comes from. I think it's some kind of alchemical thing, made up of lots of other things. Your apprehension of the world around you. Your knowledge that you are one of the few people that use the word "apprehension" in that last sentence in exactly the right way. Which doesn't mean to be fearful about something. I hope you noticed this."

• If you're wondering just how important the online comics group you've just joined is, digital communications expert Pete Ashton is on a mssion to convince people that digital forms of communication are as important as what we might call traditional ones. "That communities and relationships that are formed online are as important as those formed in the real world," he argues. "In fact I’d go further and say terms like 'real world' are redundant as the online environment is just as capable of creating results of lasting real value as face to face interactions are, especially when the two work together."
Pete is one of Birmingham’s experts on the social internet and the city’s first professional blogger. Since setting up and running the Created in Birmingham weblog (”Linking up Birmingham’s artistic and creative communities”) in January 2007 he has been in great demand from businesses and organisations who feel they need to use the internet more effectively but don’t really understand how.

Compiled with the much thanks to Matthew Badham