Manga Salad #2

"Ten years ago, nearly every subway car in Tokyo was filled with students and office workers absorbed with the latest manga magazine or paperback. On my last spin around the city in early 2005, however, I was shocked to see that almost no one reads on trains anymore; most passengers are busy playing with their cell phones, typing text messages, or playing games. While manga are still a huge industry in Japan, the real message that cell phones send is quite clear: the postwar boom is over."
—Frederik Schodt, "A Different View," Shojo Manga! Girl Power! (2005)

Will cell phones replace manga? When I look at the tons of manga readers blocking the aisle at the San Francisco Borders, and then I look at my own cell phone, on which I can't figure out how to create caller groups, it seems like a weird question…but for publishers in Japan, concerned about the shrinking market for manga magazines, it's serious. Unlikely as it seems to Americans, for whom comics reading has always been a shameful private activity, cell phones—and their many peripheral functions like going online and texting—have eaten up the commute time which people used to spend reading manga.

But the manga industry is tenacious, and if you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em, so many Japanese publishers have started offering manga on cell phones. A few American companies have joined in as well; Tokyopop, for instance, has put up many OEL series including the excellent Dramacon. But are cell phones actually the best place for manga? Only a fetishist would claim that there's something inherently superior about reading on paper, but there are many different ways to put comics in a digital format. The current boom of experimentation is like the 1800s, when bicycles were available in all kinds of strange, unwieldy shapes and sizes, before they became relatively streamlined and similar. It also reminds me of the 1990s, when Digital Manga Publishing was trying to sell manga on CD-ROMs, and ComicsOne was offering manga for download as ebooks. Both of these efforts proved unsuccessful, and as Matt Thorn (http://www.matt-thorn.com/) has suggested, cell phone manga may be yet another transitional format between traditional books and some future digital media, like ebook readers. The reality is that most manga are designed for print and just don't look good on a cell phone, with the possible exception of four-panel manga, which are simple enough to be read on a small screen. Scanlations and ebooks make a better replication of the manga-reading experience—the old ComicsOne ebooks are still very readable—but they're not very portable. For the moment, in fact, the difficulty of digitizing manga is probably helping the commercial manga market; watching an anime on youtube is almost the same as watching it on your DVD player, which sucks for Geneon, but downloading a bunch of Fullmetal Alchemist scans is still more awkward than reading the graphic novel. Even in Japan, cell phone manga often serves merely as cross-promotion for print releases.

Among all the many comics and manga adapted for cell phones, there is one manga which is only available in English in that format: Guilstein by Hisao Tamaki and Naoyuki Sakai, announced by Uclick Media in 2006. It's part of the "gocomics" service (http://www.gocomics.com/), as are Tokyopop's manga, although oddly, Tokyopop's books are listed under the "manga" section and Guilstein is listed under "comic books." In the near future, 15-year-olds are transforming into grotesque giant monsters, which go on violent rampages before they're gunned down. As the government suppresses the terrifying news, as vigilante gangs hunt down teens before they turn, our hero, Iori, begins to hear a strange voice in his dreams: "Awaken, thou beastly descendant from the fathomless universe…" When Iori finally transforms, it turns out he's the only monster—the only Guilstein—who retains his human intelligence and emotions. Recruited by a cold-hearted scientific organization, he must fight his fellow transformed teens while he and the scientists try to discover the connection between the Guilsteins and a mysterious girl found trapped in the ice at the North Pole. But wait—there's some evil blond white dude who also has conscious control of his Guilstein abilities, and he's working with the American military! The stage is set for superhero-style Guilstein battles, with a feeling of impending apocalypse…

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Next: #3: Guilstein