It’s not really webcomic related, but you will have to get your comic book content for your PSP online for the time being at least. 1up.com is running a feature story on the various forms of scanlation mangas that are currently available through less-than-legal means for viewing on your brand new PSP. They stop short of telling you exactly where to download the comics for yourself, but do point you to some sites that may be able to send you on your way.

“Scanlation” Japanese manga is currently the hot item to load up on a PSP screen. Everyday diehard manga fans are scanning old and new Japanese comic books, partnering up with translators, and digitally editing in English text over the original Japanese text bubbles. Visitors to popular scanlation sites like Manga Screener get a dosage of hand-drawn Japanese culture and dubiously translated text, with hazy copyright issues to boot. And for those who took the Cliff’s Notes route at college can now read classic literature like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick on their PSP, minus the weight of a two lb hardback.

It took Japanese PSP owners mere days to bring manga to the handheld’s image viewer mode. And even then, many onlookers asked whether tracking down good reads, converting them to jpeg image files, and resizing them to fit the PSP screen is really worth the trouble. 1UP is happy to answer that question: Yes, it is.

And the clock starts ticking on yet another opportunity that the American comic book industry is likely to miss out on because of their stubborn insistence to remain technological dinosaurs.

WebComics