Comics to go
Comics for your phone -- stories that go bzzzz!
"Write something about electronics intruding into the backgrounds of things," a friend of mine said earlier tonight.
I'm not going to do quite that, at least not now. But I have had cell phones on my mind lately, and since we're all constantly distracted by people's ringtones and conversations, I guess that's tangentially related.
It's not just that I've been writing about performances by phone (Phoning it In, Part 1 and Part 2); I also recently stumbled across MoCo News, a mobile phone industry news site. Now, not only do I live in North America, which is the backwater of the mobile world, but even by local standards I'm way behind the curve. I got my first cell phone only five or six years ago, and I've always made do with the free-or-cheapest option. So I found myself staring at these tidbits with something sadly akin to primitive wonderment.
Apparently Indian providers are just now starting to offer subscription comics to phone users. But this is old hat in East Asia. In Singapore, Japan, and Korea, various weekly comic-book episodes have been available for some time, beamed out at calibrated speeds with special phone-only enhancements: popups, background noise and bzzz! For extra plot intensity, your phone can even vibrate!
Nothing's happening on that scale in the West. There's been some movement toward releasing feature movies on SD cards for phones, as well as TV episodes. (Spongebob, believe it or not!) What sounds a lot more interesting, though, are the small independent groups releasing their own comics, cartoons, and fiction -- like Gobstopped in the UK. In the United States, Full Tilt has been releasing comics intended for phones, but because the North American market is such a tangle of carriers and formats, you can't yet get them delivered directly to your phone. You'll have to download the comics to a computer and then transfer them.
Coming up in a sentimental mood: old photos, new stories. And on another note entirely, the Newstage festival at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
