I like reading webcomics, I have been following various webcomics on and off for many years. I like reading them on my PC, while I’m going through my daily feeds in my RSS reader. And something has been bothering me – vertical comics.
Webcomics born from the tradition of the daily newspaper strip tend to be panels in a horizontal arrangement, comics from a manga or comic tradition might be laid out as if they were panels on a sheet of portrait paper. But it seems a lot of webcomics are now being published for apps like Webtoon and Tapas where the intent is for them to be read vertically on a handheld device.
I don’t read comics on a phone because I struggle to read anything on a phone for extended periods without getting a migraine. But it’s clear that’s the experience these new comic services are targeting. There are still a few more traditionally laid out comics published there, but it does seem like vertical is the way forward, which I find very unfortunate. Here follows a list of issues I have with this format:
- When reading these vertical comics on an RSS reader or via the web on a PC with a nice big widescreen monitor, if I want to be able to read a single panel I need to resize my reading pane because the single images would otherwise be so wide that the top and bottoms would be chopped off.
- When reading text in an RSS reader or on the web I can use shortcuts like page up/down to easily move through the document. This works well for text, as most applications will leave you the last line of text at the top of the screen as a reading aid. But when using images, this means that even if the comic panels were all the same size (which they are frequently not, see below), you quickly end up “out of sync” with the reading area and the panels get chopped in half, requiring fine tuning with up and down arrows. If I wanted to faff around with scanning I’d get some VHS tapes out!
- In some case it’s clear that the artist has tried to use some different panel shapes and styles which would have worked well in a free-form page, but they just don’t work when fit down into a single vertical column. You end up with wide panels being shrunk so that they fit the column width, and you lose out on detail, so it’s nigh impossible to draw a good wide spread (Though I will grant that drawing nice long portraits are still possible). Often fitting panels onto pages designed for very narrow screen ratios leaves a lot of empty space above and below panels which can break up the flow of the comic. And insets / overlapping panels don’t have quite the same feel when everything takes place in one line.
- One solution might be to download the images for processing and reading outwith an RSS reader, but I have seen cases where the website will chop up long images in odd ways, again leaving extra borders that need to be trimmed off or images just being chopped up half way through a panel. I get this is very much a “me” problem, but it’s annoying all the same.
This is not to say that vertical comics are bad.1 I still follow many comics that publish vertically, and for all my gripes above it’s not the worst thing to have to deal with. Of course, with all art, it is possible to make good things within the limitations given, and those limitations can even be a driver of new styles. And I am glad that it’s helped to popularise the web comic in a way that the RSS feed never really quite managed to do.
For me by far the biggest problem is the issue with scrolling. I suspect it may affect tablet users as well. What if there were a way to indicate where each panel began and ended? If so, someone using a more traditional user agent could use page up / page down keys to flick through the comic rather than treating it as a block of text resulting in strange scrolling. Indicating panel separation could also make it easier to resize any shorter or longer than usual panels to the reading area size without any overlap or clipping.
Many comic publishing websites only give a thumbnail in the feed and you have to visit the site itself to read, so JavaScript and customisation will be available. These sites could work to add some standard keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the comics. Not everyone wants to swipe their thumb all the time.
It’s also possible someone else has experienced this and found a solution. If you have one (that doesn’t require me to install any applications), please let me know.
- Vertically laid out comics: okay, but difficult to read. Vertical comics, the imprint: pretty good. Vertically integrated publishers: the worst ↩︎