Posting a horizontal comic?

[jmassat]

I'm making a comic that's arranged like a newspaper comic strip -- so the panels all go horizontally, and when there are more than four panels, they stack...etc etc y'know. It's clearly not optimized for Tapas. But I've been thinking about trying Tapas anyway.

My ideas for reformatting are...

• Put a bunch of comic strips together in each update, with some white space between each strip
• Make the panels bigger and stack them vertically (the problem with this is, I have occasional LONG panels and the effect of them would be different)

So what do you think would be the best way to optimize my comic for posting on Tapas? Also, are there any examples of popular strip-style comics on this site?

[domisotto]

I never read comics before joining tapas, and I find that one panel width, vertical arrangement is easier for me to follow, even if it is fairly long. I prefer that to small layouts with a few panels squished together horizontally. And I read on an iPad, so I imagine on the phone it’s even harder

[Wocalich]

I would suggest vertical strips, it's clearly what works best on Tapas.

[Puck]

cut out the panels and put them like all other webtoons, it´s the easiest solution

[VibrantFox]

as others have said your best bet would be to reformat them for vertical reading as horizontal strips will read very poorly on mobile (where a large majority of Tapas' readers are). If you're concerned about visual effects or panel gags I'd recommend trying to find ways to alter them to fit the vertical format or find a way to reorient the panels.

That's like looking at the comic pages you have on your website, for page 20 you can re-orient Pink to be hovering vertically above the bad dude and for page 21 just switch the panels to be stacked on on top of the other as opposed to side by side. Plus even with those changes it should still maintain the original effect for the gags and keep the flow of reading clear.

Hope you're able to sort things out

[mlocik97]

I think, horizontal format has both advantages and disadvantages.

Vertical format on desktop is brr, (and You are unable to rotate monitor (well, except Pivot))
Horizontal format on mobile is brr (even when You can rotate mobile, nearly no one use it)
Page (A4 paper) format is better for print...

But because today nearly everyone is addict to mobiles, I would select Vertical format, or combined (responsive) format (but this one format is supported by only few websites, and is possible only when panels has solid border in image, so You can't do panels, that are too big). So in result, vertical format is propably best for mobile adicts...

[rolypolyphonic]

My main comic hub is Instagram where sliding through images is horizontal, so sometimes I will make spread pages designed to be read horizontally and when I upload them here on Tapas or on Webtoon, either I put the combined image first and then cropped panels for readability or I put the cropped versions where they should be and the combined spread as a footnote at the very end.

Here's an example of what I'm describing: https://tapas.io/episode/2007945

You'll see the first page is a spread page and the next two pages are that first page split into two.
I make sure that even if the art is designed to be looked at as a spread, I take note of where in the middle they get split so that even if I upload them in half, none of the text bubbles or important details are cut off.

All my pages are square so instead of drawing all the panels in one page in a horizontal canvas, perhaps you could draw each panel (or a few panels each, which is what I do) on one square canvas each. That way you can stack it horizontally or vertically regardless of where you upload.

[Kaydreamer]

I'm posting my comic with typical, book-style formatted pages, because I intend to have it printed for conventions. It's not the best for phones, but it looks great on my iPad and on a laptop screen. (It's not terrible on phones either, just a tad small.)

I've seen creators of strip-style comics, like Cassandra Comics post in grids of 4x4. Doing this means any double-length panels you have won't break far out of format. Perhaps that could be a 'best of both worlds' arrangement?

[bilvyy]

as mentioned already, i would highly recommend stacking the panels vertically. it's super easy to do if the panels are disconnected from each other, and you can see it working really well with Mondo Mango for example (here's what it looks like when posted to twitter instead)

it's much easier to read on mobile, and IMO it's even nicer to look at on desktop too, since the comic is restricted to only 940px wide. let us take in all that lovely art!

[sushy00]

I have my comics as a yonkoma but I am considering stacking them as well. Not sure since it is not that many panels and it is readible....