I make comics. I grew up reading stuff that used the space of a magazine spread in all kinds of clever ways, I fell in love with the way I can play with layout across a page. I made an entire graphic novel with multiple storylines running in parallel across every page.
A phone can show one or two panels at a time, at best. There’s a lot of stuff you just can’t do. It’s a tiny, limited canvas, even before it gets shitted up with ads and pop ups.
I don't think any book could give the feeling of transitions as the webtoon format can, yes, its only a panel (or less!) at a time, but the artist can give a halting thought-by-thought feel of a man on his deathbed, or roll out an entire red carpet of flourishes to introduce a character of nobility
You can't go super transition-heavy in print, because well, printing and pages cost. and people need to move their big hands to flick the pages, there is an expected consumption rate for that effort put in, so even if cost wasn't an issue, people would get fed up with the transitions anyhow.
so yeah, 1 panel at a time, is a bit of a downside, but IMO its also an upside in that one can give each panel its own treatment and such. an infinite vertical strip as one's canvas
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of course, getting all the bits into the right places with the right breathing rooms and the right flow is a true skill in of itself, but, I dunno, is it better to read 1 super good comic, or 100 entertaining enough ones? the bar is lowered by all of this, yes, but is that a bad thing?
I've noticed this smartphone layout in comics before and I recognise the strengths but find it really less enjoyable to read. I have to be constantly scrolling and it's difficult to ever settle into a scene and feel it since they're gone in the blink of an eye. In regular pages that panel is still on the page and/or you can play with panel size and layout to create impact, but I just don't feel it with these scrolling comics.
That being said, I /do/ like the transition thing you mentioned.
I’ve recently started following a few webcomics that are phone first. I’m sure they’ve been around a while, but it was novel to me to have a story set up as a continuous downward scroll. There isn’t as much flexibility as you get with a comic spread, but there are still interesting tricks that contribute significantly to the overall feel and pacing of the story.
Definitely agree with this. They achieve a form of dynamic animation sometimes, where the continuous scroll can "lead" objects on the screen into new scenes which can be really cool. I'd recommend the previous poster to read a couple of episodes, one example I found really cool was this one https://www.webtoons.com/en/thriller/not-even-bones/ep-1/vie...
Works best on the phone where you can have it fullscreen and smooth scrolling.
I love comics like MSPA that use web elements like animation, hypertext, chatlogs, and interactive panels as progressive enhancements on the comic form. But I actually really dislike the scroll comic format.
I don't enjoy fiddling with the scroll position, or things peeking in from the edges, I like a nicely laid out scene and a button or other control that takes me to the next "page" or scene without the fuss that scrolling to the right position adds.
Scott McCloud of Zot fame was an early adopter of the web, I attended a talk from him where he was talking about how frustrated he was that the 3 panel format had persisted to the web, when there were so many ways to use space creatively.
He later adapted that talk for his "understanding comics" Ted talk. Worth a watch if you love the medium
I've got all his books and he's even linked to one of my comics in the past. http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ if you're curious.
It's pretty cool on a decent-sized screen, it was designed around the size of the iPad I'd just gotten when I started it. Not so cool on a phone. Try it on both and you'll see what I mean.
