Where Everybody's Crazy

A few weeks back Tim wrote about mobile phone novels. On Monday, I got myself a mobile phone - not a particularly good one, but it's cheap - and what did it come with but a Java comic reading application.

Mobile phones are a great medium for comics; as was pointed out on Tim's article, lots of people spend lots of time on trains, often reading comics or messing with their mobile phones - why not combine the two activities?

Additionally there are a couple of features of Japanese comics which make an electronic reader work very well. Scott McCloud's classic Understanding Comics demonstrates that Japanese comics use two effects a lot more than Western comics: bleeds - that is, panels which escape the gutter and bleed out to the edges of a page, to give a wider impression of a scene, and aspect-to-aspect transitions - several panels providing a range of views across a scene. So, how do you do a bleed on a tiny mobile phone screen? You get the same effect as a bleed, and as a aspect-to-aspect transition, by side-scrolling the panel across the screen. Side-scrolling also helps the reader to follow the order of dialogue when there is more than one speech-bubble in a panel.

And of course there are other tricks you can do with a mobile phone comic. I had just got to the bit in the story when a gunshot rang out, and at the same time, the phone vibrated like hell...