The Comics Journal

Impact City, a manga by French mangaka Nekozumi, promises a better read because it’s specifically designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Unlike the jillions of scanlated analog manga available online or on apps like MangaDL and MangaRock, each panel fits into the iPhone landscape view (there is no portrait view support) so you won’t need to scroll and zoom to read the manga on a tiny screen: “No more zooming!” the app description boasts. “The TDC™ (True Digital Comic) Technology developed by Mangako gives the opportunity for digital creators and story tellers, to build a project that fits into the device it is meant to be read on.” If that were all, though, it wouldn’t be very different from the iPhone comics from companies like Tokyopop and NTT Solmare, which fit manga into one iPhone-screen-sized panel at a time, the equivalent of panning-and-scanning old movies from widescreen to 3:4 ratio. In Tokyopop and NTT Solmare’s digital comics, the reader taps the screen to go from panel to panel. The real distinction of Impact City is that, instead of flipping the pages by hand, the comic plays automatically, like a slideshow. You can drag a slider to go forward or back among the panels, but there’s no preview image to show which panel you’re aiming for, and once the art appears on the screen, there’s no way to stop the story from ‘playing’; all you can do is adjust the playback speed, from “Very slow” to “Fast.” Dialogue balloons appear and disappear on the screen, and a few camera movements and limited animations are mixed with the 2D, black-and-white slideshow.