Valentine: serialized multilingual device-independent comics

Valentine: A supernatural thriller published in 14 languages, and multiple digital reading devices, simultaneously. Creative Commons licensed. Multilingual peeks over at Robot Comics.

Valentine is a fantasy / thriller graphic novel series by writer Alex de Campi and artist Christine Larsen. It is available in 14 languages and counting. You can't buy it in a comic book shop because it's not a traditional comic; it's a project which has been tailored specifically to be enjoyed on wireless devices

First one's free, cheap after that. Full-color digest edition available in print format when the run's done. From an interview with de Campi:

The thing you also need to keep in mind is that comics overseas are far, far bigger than they are in America. In France and Japan, there are single issues of a bande dessinee or a manga tankubon that regularly outsell in volume the entire US comic industry's output for the year.

And the format thing? Well, frankly, that's just showing off. (No, seriously, as I was talking to people about "Valentine," everyone was like, "Oh, I read on Stanza, can you have it for Stanza?" and "Could I get it on my Kindle?" and "But, I have a Sony e-Reader"...) and the joy of doing one panel per screen is that it makes the format very adaptable, both for different size screens and for right to left languages. One panel per screen may not be the way of the future, as technology evolves on an almost moment by moment basis, but it has worked very well so far for "Valentine."

• [Anonymous]

  It’s available in Irish! That is awesome!

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    Sed ne en Esperanto, bedaurinde.

• [Shay]

  Great stuff!

• [Anonymous]

  Jonathan, if you could find Alex an Esperanto translator, I’m betting she’d be down with doing an Esperanto translation!

• [alexdecampi]

  Valentine will be available for laptop/computer reading within the next four weeks via one of our distributors for those (um, such as myself) without futurephones or futurebooks. It will be persistent, so if you buy it for iPhone you can then read it on the web and vice versa.

  Oh, and Episode 04 is due out February 17. There are monsters.

  - Alex

• [alexdecampi]

  We’ve actually had hundreds of downloads of the Irish version. Dead language, my arse!

• [Shay Guy]

  The thing you also need to keep in mind is that comics overseas are far, far bigger than they are in America. In France and Japan, there are single issues of a bande dessinee or a manga tankubon that regularly outsell in volume the entire US comic industry’s output for the year.

  If you want some hard statistics on Japan, the most popular series of 2009 can be found here and individual volumes here. Those are almost-200-page-or-so paperback volumes being tracked. The most popular comic in Japan, One Piece, had a single volume sell 2,050,000 copies, sold 14,700,000 copies altogether in 2009, and in total, since it started in 1997, has sold 176,000,000 tankobon. (Watchmen fans may be amused to know that One Piece is about pirates.)

  How much do the top trade paperbacks in the US sell? How many trade paperbacks get sold total annually? And are there ANY major American comic IPs as recent as 1997? All I can think of are Runaways and Fables (Y: The Last Man probably shouldn’t count, since it’s concluded), and I don’t think they’re exactly heavy hitters.