I prefer traditional page layouts, especially when it is obvious that the artist has put a lot of thought into how the eye progresses across the page and how the reader takes in everything as a whole. The vertical format makes sense because of phone screens, but it kind of kills the art form in a lot of ways. The experience of reading a comic has always been very similar to watching a movie for me, so when you restrict the ability to do wide framing you kind of lose the cinematic quality that a lot of comics have.
The best comic art tends to be when a page, in its entirety, is treated like a single piece of art, not just a collection of panels. JH Williams III's sequential artwork would not work in a vertical format, and his stuff is sooo incredibly beautiful and thoughtful.
I've seen people do some interesting things with the scroll format, but I still think it is too much of a creative sacrifice. Designing for vertical feels too piece-meal for me, like you're hyper focused on each individual panel and you kind of lose track of the whole. Anyways, my comic is done in the traditional format and I imagine a lot of people are turned off because it isn't intended to be read on a phone, but that's fine. I'm looking forward to printing the first chapter soon.
