Amar Chitra Katha for iPhone
I found out yesterday that our beloved Amar Chitra Katha comics are now available as iPhone apps! Talk about going digital!
Amar Chitra Katha comics for iPhones
I’m really curious to see how these panels read on the small screen. The YouTube video made by the developers looks promising (but do ignore the annoying soundtrack) and although I’m sure that reading a comic book on your phone is nothing like holding in in your hand, it will be really interesting to see how the Apple’s technology is put to this new use. Now what I’d really love to see next are Indian graphic novels created specifically for mobile devices.

For me, it is important to be able to see all the panels on a comic book page…there is some level of interaction between the frames that way.
What I get from this video so far, is like a slideshow. If it atleast moved like this http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/inception-comic.html (Inception Prequel comic) it would make it far more interactive, not to mention interesting.
The Beatles are an annoying soundtrack?
I’m not a fan of comics on mobile screens, especially when the panels are not recreated for the device’s form factor. There’s a problem with more sophisticated comic page layouts than just the simple grid, because it’s important to be able to see the page as a whole, rather than just one panel at a time.
Maybe this is good for ACK, where there isn’t much experimentation with the form, but in general, I’m skeptical.
I agree that one really has to rethink comic books if one is to view them on a tiny screen, and yes it’s true that ACK never really experimented with the form in the first place. Shreyas’ link for the Cobol Job looks like a promising start in the way the programme mimicks eye movement across the page.
The truth of the matter is that mobile technology is moving so fast, with such a huge number of people reading books on screen, I have a feeling the public at large will go with whatever is offered to them at this point. Content developed specifically for the screen though, is what I’m looking forward to, because backward integration is always going to come up short one way or the other