Comic books often face real life and try to offer “a little help” within their pages. Often creatives in the industry team with organizations to craft stories specifically directed at certain issues in the hope of getting readers to pay attention. Captain America: A Little Help is an all-new story free to all fans via the Marvel Comics App and Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited that attempts to help raise awareness of suicide prevention.

From Marvel:

Written by Dr. Tim Ursiny, PH.D., CBC, RCC and illustrated by Nick Dragotta, this powerful story shows what happens when one man on the verge of suicide is drawn into a chance encounter with Captain America””and he may be the Avenger’s only hope!

“Super heroes fight a lot of battles, but there are few more important than combating suicide,” said Tom Brevoort, Senior Vice-President of Publishing. “That’s why we’re making Captain America: A Little Help available for free via our digital comics outlets. If even one person calls this number instead of doing something very tragic, we know that means we succeeded.”

On Wednesday, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was at GamersCom in Cologne, Germany to announce that they are releasing a digital reader that will work on the Sony PSP (or Playstation Portable, as it’s known to its acronym-deficient friends).

Not only will the PSP play games, music, and video, but users will also be able to use it to read access the digital library of Marvel comics. Starting in December, according to Marvel, PSP owners will be able purchase and download classic and digital first comics direct from Marvel, and then read them in a page by page or panel by panel style (however they prefer). This is a great new feature for PSP users and I’m curious to see exactly how the system works. I’ve had trouble reading comics on computers in the past, but I’m willing to give this a try.

Marvel Entertainment will begin selling digital “In-Motion” comic books through iTunes, it was announced yesterday at the Digital Media panel at New York Comic Con.

The company is working with Neal Adams and Continuity Studios to create a new form of digital comics for iTunes dubbed motion comics, which feature panels that animate scenes and add spoken dialog from voice actors. No exact price point was discussed, however, it was mentioned that multiple prices could happen depending on the content.

The Comic Con panel offered a preview of an Astonishing X-Men motion comic based on the recent Joss Whedon run, with more original content planned in the future, according to Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis, along with frequent collaborator Alex Maleev, will do a new Spider-Woman motion comic starting in February, which will be the first in-continuity title produced specifically for the new digital medium.