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liamnaughton7
Sep '20

So I've got a comic here on Tapas and on Webtoon. Without really thinking about it I went for the format that was most natural to me. A page format that uses pageturns to build up to big moments or twists. Handy enough for an eventual print run.

But, I'm getting a growing feeling that this format and the fact that's it's monochromatic is probably holding it back on this platform and that I likely should have considered the medium before I started. I'm reluctant to switch it up as this may be a jarring shift and my end goal is for this work to be in print but I don't know.

What I wanted to ask was how forgiving would the average webtoon reader be to this kind of layout and if there is anyone else out there composing their work in such a way and also grappling with these same dilemmas?

Also, I'll link my work and if anyone would like to check it out and let me know if it is hard inconvenient to read that would be greatly appreciated. I'd be happy to do the same for anyone else scroll-challenged like myself.

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    Sep '20

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    Sep '20
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liamhernandezlucas
Sep '20

A lot of people prefer the regular page layout, so if it feels natural to you, you shouldn't change it. Scroll format has its benefits, but also its demerits, like large white spaces and cramped frames.

Same goes for monochrome. A lot of people love monochromes. It's one of the reasons manga are so popular. Colour can be fun and has its advantages, but it has a very different feel and a different process too.

byelacey
Sep '20

Hi! Cartoonist who makes a greyscale comic in page format here! In short, I found tapas way more accepting of my page format updates than webtoon.

The most common comments I got when posting stuff in page format on webtoon were:

  1. "It's too short!"
    and
  2. "The text is too small!/It's hard to read"

A lot of (esp younger) webcomics readers have gotten used to reading webcomics on their phones, on apps. Many don't realize webcomics even exist (or if they do, the extent) outside of apps. While I found success posting in page format on tapas, I eventually relented and broke my pages up for vertical scroll on webtoon and it did MUCH better. The "too short" and difficulty reading comments went away, despite the amount of content being the same. People didn't even seem to care it wasn't in colour!

The upside is potentially reaching new readers when you come to them with a format they're more likely to read. The downside is it's a bit of a time sink.

M.ComicFan
Sep '20

I'm sure it's no big deal. I've seen a lot of webcomics that are drawn in a traditional page format, and I don't see anyone complaining about it. If you want to draw it in traditional format so you could potentially print it later? Go right ahead. As long as your story is good, people are still going to read it regardless of how you do it. But in the end it's up to you. I just thought I should throw my thoughts out there.

liamnaughton7
Sep '20
liamhernandezlucas

I'm going to be honest, I prefer it myself. I've built up this whole skillset for it and while some of it's lost when not in print it'd feel like a waste to pull down to something more simplistic.

I like colour but I've got a lot more control of mood in B+W. Plus it's easier to make something more convincing in a way. Like picture degradation on VHS and old TVs can make special effect blend a little better with live action.

liamnaughton7
Sep '20
byelacey

Oh I've been tempted to try and cut up pages and arrange them for scrolling but panel breaks and speech bubbles are baked into the inks so it would be a nightmare to do. It would take forever.
I've also been told that young people would be less keen on my shit so maybe that's a sinking ship.

liamnaughton7
Sep '20
M.ComicFan

You are, in all likelihood, correct.
I should quiet that voice within that calls me to burn it all down and build it again.

byelacey
Sep '20
liamnaughton7

Ooh, yeah, it would be really hard to do if everything's stuck together! If that's the case, I'd continue to post to webtoon anyway (maybe less frequently, with more pages at once). A potential readership is what it is!

liamhernandezlucas
Sep '20
liamnaughton7

The young people argument is a bit overrated. People develop tastes based on what they're offered. It's either what we grow up on that leads us to our tastes, or the desire for something different. If your story is good, you'll find people who like it, and other people will learn to like it. Otherwise, we'll have to accept that the next six generations of media will all be low quality love triangle young adult rebellion stories and just give up on making anything else.

So the biggest thing in making your work work is not the style choices, but the quality of its execution, and based on a few glimpses, I think you have that down pretty well.

wekanian
Sep '20

I have experience with changing format from paper-BW to Webtoon-colored. My readers didn’t seem to be bothered by it and they even welcomed it as it was easier for them to tell characters apart (my comic got same face syndrome and still fight against it haha).

Both formats have their own advantages and disadvantages, however if you decide to change the format, by experience I say there is nothing to worry about. You can also warn your readers beforehand that there will be a change in the format.

liamnaughton7
Sep '20
byelacey

@byelacey
Oh I've been doing that in groups of between 4 and 5 pages. (Depending on page turns.) But yeah, I'm going to just keep plugging away for now and try to improve the work more so than drastically change it.

@liamhernandezlucas
I'm not sure I ever understood the young people argument. I'm not sure I ever understood people full stop so I just took it as a given. I should just stop my bellyaching but I felt the compulsion to give my worry a voice and a name so as to drain it of it's power in a vaguely totemic sense, I guess. And thank you.

@wekanian
Thing is, I worry about it and am still resistant to it. I think, were I to go for scroll format I may want to wrap this work up or maybe put it on a break and devise a new work that's completely built around the format. Or at least a short to see how I feel. The source for anxiety for me was mostly a feeling of wasting my time but the responses I got have perked me up a touch. A wave of self-pity, maybe, or just a need to be seen, I suppose. As a frail little human in an increasingly lonely world, such is my wont.

Zino
Sep '20

Ok dude so I read your comic and I'm actually against the whole turning it into a webtoon format -thing. I think your paneling is absolutely fantastic and you do better than a great job with the monochrome coloring. Simply, I think your comic is amazing (and should be sold at shops). And I think turning it into scrollable, vertical comic with colors would kill something of it. Plus I didn't have any problems reading the text, so it wasn't too small or anything.

But hey, it's your call. But I srsly don't think your comic needs to be changed in any way, you're clearly crazy talented doing what you do now.

HGohwell
Sep '20

Here on Tapas, regular page format is totally fine. There are plenty of people who still enjoy it and even prefer it. Tapas itself recommends scrolling and it can be done fantastically, but if you're comfortable with pages, as long as your text is big enough, you should be fine. There are plenty of high ranking webcomics that are page format and monochrome. On Webtoons, scrolling and colour is pretty standard and I've not seen many page by page types perform that well. Webtoons leans towards longer and scrolling updates less frequently compared to Tapas' smaller and more frequent updates too.

But yeah, here on Tapas, pages and monochrome are fine, it's a minor disadvantage but it's not huge. It's not going to hold you back. Webtoons would be more of an uphill battle.

rajillustration
Sep '20

The way I see it (as someone who is wrapping up work on a page format monochrome graphic novel that I put a lot of time and effort into, but because it looks a little different and has a few more words, it kinda capped at 110 subs after posting weekly for 2.5 years) is that there are stories that do well on this platform because it fits really well into the needs and wants of this platform initially (and that initial response is really important!), and then there's stories that will take more work to get the audience to here.

Tapas really is just a place to house our stories, and so they don't really have a great way of getting the right people who enjoy page format to our page format comics--you gotta go offsite to do that on like Twitter or Instagram (which I just didn't have time to really do, being real. The page format people who do well here--with only maybe a few exceptions I can't even think of right now, get most of their traffic offsite).

Not saying that Scroll is inferior or superior, but just that the two formats are different because they tell stories a different way and for a different audience. In the end you have to do the format that is best suited for your story and for your audience because you are the one that knows the end goal. If your end goal is strictly going premium on Tapas and Webtoon...then yes, that's a problem. Front page picks must be stories that are easy to read on the phone--they don't strictly choose scroll format, but if you have a lot of small panels with small font, then that significantly lowers your chances of being picked. But if you're looking for print and patreon as your endgame...then you're fine. It doesn't matter. People who buy physical copies and who give to Patreon typically come from social media and other places you promote.

I've been there trying to half-ass two things and make my page format comic into a scroll format and it was hella bad experience--10/10 do not recommend. But, we're made of more than one story. When I made a different story that was really built for phone format from the get go, then it turned out good and it flowed really well, and it worked because that was my plan from the beginning.

So, I'm not going to lie to you, it is an uphill battle and it is very frustrating to be told "no, your format is fine" when every criticism you get is "It's not nice for the phone" and it's like Put the damn phone down I spent 100+ hours of my life writing this thing. There's no way around it, a lot of phone people who read on the phone will pass it over. People who have a hard time telling characters apart in black and white comics will pass it over. There's just no way around that.

But, if it means anything, the support you get for page comics like that tends to be really genuine. I've had readers who were really excited about my work because it didn't look like everything else. It really helps you push forward when you're making something that really speaks to you rather than try and fill a checklist of "what will make me famous".

liamnaughton7
Sep '20

@HGohwell I'm starting to get that impression yeah. Figure I shouldn't expect too much from WT but I am releasing pages in chunks there. I'll keep going my way I think. It's the way I've always enjoyed doing it. Just worried that it wouldn't be enjoyable to read here.

@rajillustration The big thing I've seen today is that the responses I got were really very passionate so that put to ease my feeling of trying to put a square peg into a round hole. (Or a rectangular peg into a different rectangular peg that goes on forever??) So that's put me at ease a good bit. The main thing for me rather than getting famous or anything was making something at least "someone" would enjoy and I thought I may not have really been doing that here. I could live with being "niche".