I fondly recall the hours I spent in Akihabara entering the comics shops featuring all of the greatest adventures of Rocket Boy alongside thick tomes of nurse- and animatronic-hentai-tentacle- porn. Now, however, you don't have to hang out with mildly obsessive otaku-boyz to get your manga fix as distributors like Sony make more and more comic book titles available for download via cellphone.

Up next? Vibrating, noise-making comics. A Zen koan: If they make noise, are they really comics?

Pop-up frames and vibration during action scenes add to the drama. Cell-phone comics with preprogrammed sound effects are also coming soon, said Toppan Publishing spokesman Katsunori Onishi.

Companies offer cell-phone comics in Japan [BusinessWeek via MocoNews]

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