Comics on mobile phones? Yes, indeed! The screens of the latest generation of Nokia devices are perfectly capable of handling the resolution and full color depth necessary to portray the individual panels. That is true even with the extended panels that sometimes occupy a major portion of a comic book page. As such, we’re seeing more and more interesting examples of comic books in the digital format, including offerings from Carnival Comics and Mobcomics, to name a few.

By way of comparison, the content reading mechanism created by IDW Publishing for Nokia Symbian OS, S60 5.0 devices contains a zoom feature that allows such large panels to be examined in detail.

In the two series that I examined, the Astro Boy series and the Star Trek series, the editors had parsed the content for optimum viewing on the screen of my Nokia N97. First, let’s look at the viewing mechanism controls.

In the lower right is the zoom magnifying glass, which zooms in about 2X on the screen. I did not really find myself using it, because the material was already parsed for optimum viewing. The left and right arrows at the mid-height go forward and backwards through the panels.

I also found that when I slid the horizontal slider at the bottom of the panel, it could move rapidly along the episode, indicating the panel number as it went along. Below, the indicator is on panel 42, about halfway through the episode.

So, how do the IDW Publishing comic book versions of Astro Boy and Star Trek compare to the movies from which they were derived? Well, for one thing, they are comic books and not movies. That means that there is no musical score to cue your emotions on how to react. There is also not the frame-to-frame continuous motion that one gets from a motion picture. And the Blu-Ray 1920×1080 resolution is more fine-grain than the 640×360 resolution of the Nokia N97 screen.

But then, anyone who has ever read a comic book printed on paper knows about these differences. There are many who would say that the comic book experience is more participatory, in that it is the imagination of the reader that fills in the voids between the key frames, that generates the voices of the different characters and the sound of the actions inside the mind of the beholder.

In this batch of comics for Nokia’s touch-enabled devices, we are seeing straight-up comic book renditions. As the medium matures, I would not be surprised to see multimedia added to the comics, first in sound, then in visual sequences, until there is a continuum between the standard comics and the movie versions. The main trade off will be file size, with the straight comic book approach loading in approximately six megabyte chunks. In the case of both the Astro Boy and Star Trek movie adaptations, it took four such chunks to make each digital comic.

In the case of Astro Boy, the first part is free while parts 2, 3, and 4 are only $0.99 (USD) each. In the case of Star Trek, each of the four parts cost $1.99 (USD).

In diving into the content, I found that the comic book versions contained a few things that were not contained in the movie versions. For example, the comic version of the Star Trek movie begins with the birth of Spock, while the movie version goes straight to the confrontation between the U.S.S. Kelvin and the vengeful Captain Nemo that happened many years later.

In addition, the comic book version of Star Trek includes more of an introduction of the adolescent James T. Kirk than the movie does. The movie introduces the adolescent Kirk as speeding down an Iowa highway in a red Corvette and being chased by an airborne motorcycle cop. We see the future Captain Kirk driving maniacally and diving out of the Corvette before it plunges into a deep canyon. Very flashy, but we are never told why Kirk did that.

The comic book version tells us why by starting just a little bit earlier with Kirk. It turns out that Kirk was running away from the Iowa farm owned by his domineering uncle, that the Corvette was Kirk’s dead father’s car, and that Kirk would rather destroy it than see his uncle sell it off and keep the money for himself.

The Astro Boy character was created by Osamu Tezuka, the father of the manga comic genre, in Japan in 1951. It became wildly popular in Japan over the years, leading to numerous spin-off series as well as to translation into English in the mid-1960s. In 2009, a computer-animated feature film from Imagi Animation Studios was released, and it is this version that was adapted to the comic format by IDW Publishing for S60 5.0 devices.

The plot of the Astro Boy movie revolves around the acts of a President who believes that the only way that he can be re-elected is to start a war. This plot line seems as contemporary in 2010 as it did in 1951. He has the pure-evil red core energy placed into his most powerful military robot (the Peacekeeper), which immediately goes on a rampage that kills Toby, the brilliant son of Dr. Tenma, the head of the Ministry of Science. Dr. Tenma then builds a robot boy to look just like Toby, and who is powered by the pure-good blue energy.

While not all of the dialogue of the Astro Boy movie fits into the comic book version, all of the main plot points and key frames are covered. In addition, the comic book version has some amusing tidbits that were left out of edited film. For example, when Toby outsmarts a guard robot at the beginning of the film, his snide response to the robot’s jeer was deleted.

When Toby’s robot replacement finally realizes that he is a robot and not a boy, he takes on the robot name Astro. This is in both the film and the comic, but a couple of funny-but-snippy lines in Astro’s encounter with the Robot Revolutionary Front are included in the comic, but were cut from the film. My favorite were the Lenin-McCartney lines shown below.

Astro Boy is good, clean, robot-bashing fun, and it is interesting to note that if it had been created in America like most comics during that time, it would have never been placed on store shelves. The Comics Code Authority, which held sway in America from 1948 through the 1980s, specifically forbade the depiction of “policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions … in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.” Astro Boy’s depiction of the bumbling and evil President Stone nowadays is seen for the amusing satire for which he was created.

Both Astro Boy and Star Trek comic renditions are winners. If I had to choose just one, I would go with Astro Boy for its witty satire, social relevance, and better global pricing model.

There are also other related comics available in Ovi Store, including: Astro Boy Underground, Star Trek Mirror Images and Star Trek Nero.

Star Trek can be found in Ovi Store for $1.99 (USD); and the first part of Astro Boy is free in Ovi Store. All Star Trek parts are priced at $1.99 (USD) and the other parts of Astro Boy (after the free part 1) are priced at $0.99 (USD).

Editor’s Note: Do you read comics on your mobile device? If so, which ones are your favorites? Let us know in the Comments section below.