"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."
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.
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2009
