START // 12.19.02

FLASHBANG
By Alasdair Stuart

Let's talk about phones.

I recently re-entered the wonderful world of the mobile. I didn't really have a choice as the last one was the size of a brick, utterly uncharged and about as contemporary as Milli Vanilli. People need to contact me and I need to contact other people; ergo, I need a phone.

Which as it turns out, is harder than it seems. You see, I thought all that happened was that I would go into a phone store, find a good phone, buy a good phone and then leave. I'm not fussy, I'm not fashion conscious (although I did quite want one with a flip down lid, but that wasn't for fashion reasons), all I want is a phone that MAKES PHONE CALLS.

The old Denis Leary routine about coffee and what flavor he wanted (" I want COFFEE FLAVORED!") leaps instantly to mind. Because in this country at least, these things are like underwear. Hundreds of sizes, hundreds of options and hundreds and hundreds of pounds. Answer me this:

How can a PHONE cost three hundred quid-nearly $480 American?

After recoiling in horror at the prices from hell, and realizing for the umpteenth time that I'm in the wrong industry, I got to work. The flip down, vaguely STAR TREK style lid was abandoned because it apparently adds eighty pounds (over one hundred twenty five dollars American) to the price whilst the nice one with the rotating lid was abandoned because it cost as much as the GNP of Zimbabwe. I don't care about games, I don't care about WAP all I care about is talking to another human being.

So, we end up going for the cheapest phone there. Its small, its blue, it fits my hand and it came with twenty pounds worth of free airtime. I can talk to people, people can talk to me. Everyone's happy.

A few days pass and I'm playing with my new toy. Its a nice design, elegant, practical and with that kind of TONKA toy chunkiness that I always find oddly comforting. This is a phone I could dropkick and it would still work.

It's also a phone with games.

And an internet connection.

And the capacity to store digital photos.

For sixty pounds. That's around one hundred dollars American.

As usual, this got me thinking. What got me thinking even more was how little space the games take up in terms of memory. Written largely in a derivation of Java web page code, they're amusing ways to waste ten minutes of your life. Reasonably pretty, moderately fun.

And they should be comics.

The art quality is good enough that you could get away with it. A decent graphic designer could turn in something that told a story, took up minimal space and was even animated to a greater or lesser extent. Market it as part of the 'Extras' package most phone companies offer and you've got the makings of a serial. Here's the gigs for the week and here's the latest part of KICKBOX NAZIS MUST DIE, or whatever.

Recent experience has proven to me that comics can be orders of magnitude that is LESS graphically sophisticated than what you'd get on a mobile phone and still work incredibly well. Jose Mochove and Rusty Rowley's stunning FULL SANCTION does what it needs to do with stick figures and is hands down funnier than most comedy books on the market, just to give you an example.

Which isn't to say that this would be easy. Most phone screens are miniscule and as a result, the art of the comic strip would have to be relearned. People like Frank Cho have been doing this for years, and it's perfectly suited to this medium. Tell a story in three panels at least, five at most and leave a cliffhanger for the next installment. That way, people are entertained and might actually hang around long enough to be sold whatever the mobile phone company's trying to shift.

Big companies could use it to push new books and DIY creators could use it to get themselves noticed. It wouldn't be webcomics, pamphlets, trades or strips, it would be something new, something different.

And for that reason alone, it's worth a try. Phone comics should be coming your way soon. I'm shocked no one has done it yet.