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leebasil
Dec '20

Hello! I've been thinking about going back and altering formatting for parts of my comic, and I wanted to get advice.

I do a comic called Soliloquy, which alternates between various comic and visual novel-inspired presentation styles. I like this format and I think it's really fun, but I'm having second thoughts about how I've chosen to present the traditional comic pages.

Comic pages like this5 make up the bulk of my updates. I chose to orient them horizontally, and on my website1, everything is presented with these image sliders that I think work really well with the more visual novel-y formating I use in other sequences. (Example of that if you're curious.1)

But I'm thinking about going back and reformatting the comic pages so they'll be in a longer scrolling format, and thus bigger and more mobile-friendly. I'd also go back and increase text size on my other page styles.

I have a few hesitations about this. First... I really like my paneling hahah. I'm worried that spacing things out vertically will make my layouts look worse. Secondly, it's going to take a long time to fix, and I'd have to take a hiatus to reformat old pages. I worry that I'm overthinking it, because my friends have said that they like my current format, and I shouldn't secondguess it. To be honest, I tend to struggle with perfectionism, and I'm unsure whether my current concerns are valid or just an excuse to worry.

So I wanted advice!! Has anyone here ever reformatted their comic this way after starting? Do you think it helped with readability, and do you think mine would benefit? Do you think the present formatting is difficult to read? Alternately, would anyone prefer the way it is currently...?

Thanks in advance!!

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    Dec '20

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rajillustration
Dec '20

It's worth a shot, but in the end, it's up to you!

I went through the effort a while back to reformat old pages, and it took several hours per episode--and in the end it wasn't worth it to me because my paneling was what sold my comic in the first place (I was doing a really simplified comic with very thin linework, and so increasing the size of panels was...hell, I'd have to redraw everything), so what I did was just...end the comic I was doing and do a new one that would be in the scroll format from the beginning.

But I know other people who've planned to do multiple formats, so they keep really high quality files of all their panels so they can reformat easier. I do think you lose something in the panelling, that can't be avoided--that and a lot of long format is effective because of tall panels with a lot of physical space, so you may need to redraw some panels to immerse your reader--but that all depends on how much time you put into it.

So it's up to you, but if you have a ton of content--then it may be best to leave it as it is, and just continue from where you are in the format you want for the future. Webcomics are pretty fluid, and especially if you have an older comic, people are pretty understanding about page format. It hurts it's chances of being on front page and does mean that a lot of people won't or can't read it, but like...you have to decide on your own after testing it out if the ends justify the means, since it will take a really long time, depending on how many pages you're doing. For me, personally--I didn't see a rise in viewership really after I tested it out since my comic was already so small...so that was part of my reason to just...let it go and move on.

leebasil
Dec '20

ahh thank you for the feedback!! I luckily do have all of my original images saved at a larger scale, so editing them would definitely be time consuming but I wouldn't be forced to redraw too terribly much... I'm going to think about it more, thank you for your input!!!