HELSINKI, Finland – Charles Schulz it's not.
But the world's most ambitious effort to popularize comic strips on cell phone screens has developed a tiny cult following among tech-heads in Europe -– and new agreements will shortly place it before tens of thousands more people in Europe, Asia and South America.
More than 3,000 Europeans religiously log in five days a week to a free Nokia mobile Internet site that chronicles the adventures of Flip and Mick, two one-time comic book characters who find themselves mysteriously "WAP-ed" into the pixelated world of mobile phones.
Crudely drawn and filled with often-arcane dialogue, the strip is nevertheless the most concerted attempt yet to beam serial stories and art over cellular networks.
"It's a familiar piece of entertainment transmitted through a very personal, very portable device," said American-born Douglas Smith, chief creative officer for Moving Entertainment, the Helsinki company that has created 400 episodes involving the characters.
"The appeal is its novelty and the instant laugh you get, just like any comic strip. It's an enticing way to kill five minutes while you're waiting for a bus."
Smith predicts that new agreements with mobile portals in Finland, Norway, Thailand and Brazil will raise readership to 50,000 by the end of the year. He hasn't signed any agreements with U.S. partners yet, although Americans with WAP phones can access the service directly at www.mobile.club.nokia.com.
WAP, or wireless application protocol, is an international standard for wireless Internet transmission. In the United States, WAP is offered by a minority of operators, including Cingular. The Nokia site above can only be accessed from a WAP phone.
Now, like any startup Internet content site, Moving Entertainment faces the challenge of making money. For now, Smith is packaging the strip with a selection of 48 of Moving Entertainment's other services, including downloadable ring tones, graphics, games and other cartoons.
Mobile partners such as Norway's Telenor and Brazil's Yavox have agreed to share 30 percent of the revenue they get from the services with Moving Entertainment. They'll offer "Flip and Mick" either through their own wireless portals or through SMS messages, a way of sending short text and graphics to mobile phones.
Even so, Smith says Moving Entertainment can survive on "Flip and Mick" and related content alone. To generate additional revenue, he's turning to other cell phone services such as one that allows fans at rock concerts to buy merchandise or view trivia about their favorite band.
"It's very difficult for a mobile company to survive just on content," he said. "Look what happened to AtomShockwave (a popular animation site that laid off a chunk of its workforce in recent weeks). What happened to Internet content sites is going to happen to mobile content sites over the next year and a half."
Will comics over the airwaves suffer the same fate? Not necessarily, maintains Jim Griffin, CEO of Evolab, a media and technology company that specializes in wireless delivery of digital media.
Comic strips "drive eyeballs, and more importantly, they pull phones off hooks," Griffin said. "Unlike on the Internet, operators make money each time a cell phone is used. It's not that comics are the be-all and end-all. It's that they're one very easy way to better utilize a pipe that's being used at about 2 percent capacity. They're the low-hanging fruit."
A few other companies also offer wireless comics. Finland's Jiipi and Britain's Cartoonscape.com each have several wireless strips for WAP phones. Japan's iMode service offered by NTT DoCoMo has attracted its own cult following, in part for animations that can easily be downloaded to users' phones. United Media, the giant cartoon syndication service, has licensed some of its own characters to wireless operators worldwide.
But "Flip and Mick" is the only strip that has attracted an international following based on material specifically designed for the airwaves.
These aren't cartoons you're likely to paste on your refrigerator. The plot lines require an appreciation of cell phones and their limitations: The characters often whine about how their once well-defined features have been wiped out by their stay in the low-resolution, cell phone universe; guest characters are "WAP-ed" into the strips, and so on. Many of the strip's loyal readers, Smith said, are telecom engineers and cellular phone salesmen. The pictures look like doodles by a 5-year-old.
Then again, Smith notes, the first examples of popular Internet content in the 1980s weren't much to look at, either. "The Internet evolved," Smith said, "and wireless content will also evolve."
