Newspaper comics have been getting thin recently. There are fewer good new ones and the draughtsmanship of many is getting downright awful.
But according to a report from the Times of London this week, comics — especially old ones — are getting a new lease on life with cellphones. According to the story, publishers want to attract readers by sending strips as picture messages. They’re even trying to figure out how to embellish the comics with sound.
The comics work as a slide show sent to a cellphone; strips as long as 12 frames are sent cellphones as multimedia service (MMS) messages. In England, the strips are being sold for about 1.50 pounds each or 10 pounds for 100. Customers are now willing to pay to read these comics — something unthinkable in the days when comics were regarded as “free” features used to sell newspapers.
In this scheme of things, it seems everyone is winning. Strong cartoons, such as Garfield and Doonesbury, are attracting customers, who are reviving old comic characters (such as England's Beano), many of whom are being hauled out of the archive vault, where they had been consigned, perhaps forever. Rok Comics has been in the cellphone-comics business all of two months and has picked up several hundred subscribers, with about 10,000 hits a day on its website.
In manga-happy Japan, Tokyo-based electronic books company Papyless made $17-million (U.S.) over the past year.
Mark Hunter, head of digital projects for publisher D.C. Thomson, told The Times that recycling mothballed strips is an age-related process. Children, he said, don’t care when a strip was written as long as they could relate to the characters. “We also want to appeal to an adult market who want to go back to characters they remember from childhood,” he said.
And, come to think of it, many of the comics had little opportunity to find their youthful audiences in the old days, appearing as they did in adult-oriented newspapers. Today, however, a lot more kids have cellphones than their parents had newspaper subscriptions when they were the same age.
I also wonder when this idea is going to be marketed here. We’re getting so many different features on each cellphone that we don’t need, perhaps service providers will actually start selling us stuff we’d like to have, if not need.
I’m thinking of Rogers Wireless, in this case, which this week launched a small-to-medium business service in which a second voice line can be added to the cellphone service, meaning two phone numbers will ring on the same cellphone.
This is a dour, work-related development, doubling the probability you will get suckered into working more when you’re away from the office.
Give me comics any day.
