Mobile Manga Review: Go! Comi Unveils iPhone Version of Japan Ai

First TokyoPop got on the mobile manga tip. Next Digital Manga Publishing put their hat in the ring, with the addition of Vampire Hunter D for the iPhone. Now Agoura Hills, California-based Go! Comi has jumped into the fray by making Japan Ai: A Tall Girl's Adventures in Japan, Aimee Major Steinberger's charming Japan travelogue / sketchbook available on the iPhone.

Okay, so you may be saying, why should I get the iPhone version when I could get the book instead? Or maybe you've already purchased it when it first came out last year. For the introductory price of 99 cents, you'll not only get all the charming illustrations and commentary from the 190-page print version of Japan Ai, you'll also get a few nifty extras:

• Over 20 color photos of some of the places and events described in the book

• 60 click n' hear Japanese vocabulary words so you have no excuse to say "Akihabara" or "Mandarake" incorrectly ever again.
• And a fairly smooth interface created by Zeitgeist Games that gives two choices for how you want to flip your pages (flip or curl) and the option to move to the next page by shaking your phone.

Is that enough to justify making an additional purchase of Japan Ai? Perhaps not if you've already read the book. But if you've not experienced this charming travelogue before, that 99-cent price makes it pretty darn appealing to give it a try.

Steinberger's episodic sketches make it easier to adapt to the iPhone format because she doesn't have to deal with those pesky panels or guiding the readers' eyes through a page. It's also nice that it's easy to blow up and look at panels with just a flick of the finger.

There are natural limitations to the iPhone format -- mostly having to do with the size of the phone. In browse mode, much of the screen is taken up by a pink border and the Japan Ai logo at the top. This makes the previewed images of pages are very tiny and blurry, making it difficult to search for a particular page, especially if it's a black and white image. It's all fine and good to use the flashy card flip motif to browse through pages, but it's not very fun if you can't see what pages you're browsing. The images are scanned at an acceptable resolution level, but some text, like the smaller script font on several pages is a bit fuzzed out and difficult to read when you try to go in for a closer look.

Japan Ai iPhone interface does have several nice features, but it does have the same problem that the other iPhone manga applications have: It requires that you download each one, and each is a separate icon on your iPhone desktop. It seems that the manga publishing biz can't agree on a single platform for publishing mobile comics, so each publisher has their own take on it. It would be preferable to have a single manga viewer platform that readers can download and read several titles in a virtual library by clicking just one icon, but given that there are so many players vying for position in this field, that isn't likely to happen soon.

So a pat on the back to Go! Comi for entering the brave new world of mobile manga. They haven't quite revolutionized the market with this offering, but the little extras are a nice touch that offer a glimpse of how publishers can make provide additional value to make handheld comics an appealing buy for comics readers.

Image credit: © Aimee Major Steinberger