President Obama Challenged

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HONG KONG, China (CNN) — Are comics made to be read on cell phones, Kindles and iPods the new pulp of pop culture?

Argentinean artist Sergio Carrera’s “The Eternal City” has gained fans around the world.

While mobile manga has become increasingly popular and lucrative in Japan, in recent months start-ups have been mushrooming around the world to bring comics and graphic novels to both loyal fans and new audiences — all in the palm of your hand.

“I wanted to break all the barriers between comics and their potential readers,” said Hermes Pique, director of Robot Comics, a company that produces and publishes comics for mobile devices.

“In a world where 60.6 percent of the population has a mobile, and where mobiles have evolved from phones to all-purpose gadgets, mobile comics seemed the best way to start.”

Apple’s App Store, a hotbed for mobile innovation, has seen an increase in applications dedicated to reading comics, many of which are also available for other mobile platforms.

Among these, several offer digitized titles from top U.S. comics publishers such as DC Comics and IDW, while Dark Horse has even launched its own series of iPhone comics.

Comic series, like their print counterparts, are usually divided into parts, which in the App Store sell from $0.99 to a few dollars or more for graphic novels. The first installment is sometimes offered as a free preview.

The mobile Kindle reader can display e-versions of graphic novels (albeit optimized for the larger-screen Kindle DX), as can other mass-market e-readers such as Barnes & Noble and Stanza.

Independent developers have also been finding ways to get comics on to handheld devices, from applications that display comics through RSS feeds to others that convert online comics for mobile reading.

If getting the comics onto these devices is one challenge, another is to improve the on-screen experience, evolving from straightforward zoom-and-scroll browsing to more sophisticated navigation.

Some readers offer panel-to-panel transitions that appear to simulate the visual movement of reading a comic book, while other companies work with the artist to optimize each panel of the story specifically for the mobile screen.

And in France, where comics and graphic novels are known as the 9th art form, 2006 Angouleme Grand Prize winner Lewis Trondheim’s “Bludzee,” produced by Ave!Comics, will launch its daily made-for-mobile “strip” on September 1, 2009 — simultaneously in 19 languages and available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia.

So it seems that for this generation of comic artists, interface designers and content creators of all kinds, when it comes to telling stories on mobile screens, they’re spoiled for choice.