HIGH GEAR

It's a new month and it's time to kick this thing into high gear. I have big plans for this site and the world of mobile manga in general is going to be big. Companies in Japan are popping up extremely fast. I have recently found two new mobile and digital manga sites in just that last week. They see that this is where it's at. Not to be left behind in what I see as an incredible sea of possibility, I am creating some serious new work myself.

I am working on a new series called Evidemic. I don't want to say too much about it because it will be available for free download here very soon and you can see for yourself. Needless to say, it involves a very different kind of disease. I am learning a lot when it comes to creating art for the mobile content generation. The rules no longer apply. The one thing you will find here that most other places are not doing is content specifically formatted, nay, created for the mobile device in question. Chopping up print comics and making them fit on a phone may be a start, but the real revolution begins with content designed exclusively for the device. Why not take advantage of the technology?

Creating art for the iPhone as opposed to print yields some very different challenges. Your screen is smaller than a page, but it is also extremely sharp and crisp. You can't display a standard comic page, but you can do something new and fitting that I think is very impressive. There is a combination of page and screen coming into play. Now some things, image wise, which look good in video or film, can look good on a manga page. I will certainly be taking more advantage of that in this and future titles.

There will surely be a lot of titles, and not just by me. One of the many things I intend to do this month, as I kick things into high gear, is to get a full online store integrated into this site. I've already spoken to a few artists and publishers who have shown great interest. I expect the expansion of this site will be quick. Of course, I also have a ton of ideas and stories I want to tell, and I can think of no better way to tell them than through iPhone manga.

Another thing I intend to see accomplished this month is that I plan to go all out. I am going to advertise. When I created my first independent project, a DVD called Understanding Chaos, I did what might now be called traditional web advertising, and it worked. It brought people in and generated great interest in the project. Although I have created other projects since then, I haven't returned to the method of market generation I started with. Well, advertising is expensive right? Not today. It's easier than ever with all the tools available on the web. So I will do a real campaign to push and build this site.

All in all, I am preparing for 2008 to be the year of mobile manga. It will explode. In Japan, it already has. A fully Japanese version of this site and all products is on the horizon too. There's a lot to create in the coming weeks and months, so I guess I better get started!

Tags: Manga, iPhone