The comic book, a staple of British childhood for 90 years, is to receive a 21st-century makeover as the adventures of characters such as Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan are sent frame-by-frame to children’s mobile phones.

In a move that will challenge the traditional comic, publishers are looking at ways of dramatically reducing costs and attracting readers by sending strips as picture messages.

Operators are also looking at ways of incorporating real sounds to accompany the written gnashes, thwacks and kerplunks traditionally found in cartoon stories. D.C. Thomson, the Dundee-based company behind The Beano and The Dandy, has been approached to license its characters for handset downloads. In Japan there has been growing investment in the technology as telecoms operators boost profits using the popularity of manga comics.

Unlike traditional comics, the new service works by sending cartoons directly to customers as digital slideshows. Strips of up to 12 frames are converted into digital files and sent to handsets using MMS (multimedia message service) technology.

The service has breathed new life into comics, which have suffered from dwindling circulation since their heyday in the 1950s, and has revived characters that were put out to pasture in the 1970s. Classic cartoon characters such as Sydney Jordan’s Jeff Hawke, a sci-fi adventurer who appeared in a national newspaper from 1955 to 1974, have been brought back by Rok Comics, a British company that launched its cartoon service in June. Strips cost £1.50 each but subscribers can get 100 stories for £10. John Freeman, managing director of Rok Comics, said that the service had picked up several hundred subscribers in its first two months. “Strips like Garfield and Doonsbury have helped to spread the message,” he said. “We’re getting 10,000 hits a day on our site.”

The advantage of using mobile phones rather than the internet as a distribution network is that people are prepared to pay for the service, he added.

D. C. Thomson is considering recycling old cartoon strips for a new generation. Mark Hunter, head of digital projects, said that children did not care when a strip was written as long as they could relate to the characters. “We also want to appeal to an adult market who want to go back to characters they remember from childhood,” he said.

Stories from The Beano and The Dandy can already be downloaded on to iPods and gaming consoles such as the PSP, but mobile phones represent a more lucrative market.

The success of manga for mobiles has helped to lift profits in Japan. Papyless, a Tokyo-based specialist in electronic books, made $17 million (£8.5 million) in the year to March — more than double the previous year.

Rich Johnston, a columnist who specialises in the comic books industry, predicted that mobile phones would become a popular medium. “The principal audience for comic books is young people, who are much more used to reading things in digital form,” he said. “Screen sizes are getting larger, and devices like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP are ideal for viewing images on.”

Rok Comics also hopes to spark an international revival for characters such as Archie the Robot, long forgotten in Britain but with a cult following in India and Pakistan, according to Mr Freeman. The character, who first appeared in Lion magazine in 1952, is popular on the subcontinent.

Adult comics are also available, including Crazy Mary, a violent graphic novel about a female bounty hunter.

Dr Chris Murray, an English lecturer at Dundee University with a specialist interest in the history of comics, said: “People who say this will be the death of the traditional comic book are wrong. People once said that film would be the death of the printed word. But after nearly 100 years of film, people are still reading books.”

High-tech lit

— Publishers including Mills and Boon, Penguin and Random House have all signed up to allow readers to download novels on to mobiles

— The text is delivered a word at a time or as scrolling sentences

— In Japan in the first half of this year, novels for mobile phones and PDAs out-sold printed publications Unlikely titles converted to the technology include Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

Source: Times database, tech.co.uk

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