I'm planning on making my comic traditionally because I want to eventually print it and I much prefer the traditional format.
I've tested reformatting before and it is an utter pain. Do you guys have any tips on making reformatting easier/ faster?
Aug '21
Aug '21
I draw all my pages for print, then just spread the panels out a bit vertically and stack two pages on top of each other to create a "pseudo-scroll" format. It largely works out pretty well for me. Keep it simple, and definitely do your speech bubbles AFTER spacing out the panels (you may well want the bubbles and text to be bigger than they'd be in print anyway and that's fine because you can make use of some gutter space). I pretty much just export my page from CSP as a jpg, open in Photoshop, use the rectangular or polygon selection tools and nudge my panels downwards using transform and pressing the down arrow key and shift 3-4 times for most of them, then add text and stuff.
I'd almost say f*ck that vertical scroll thing but that's because I am too attached to the traditional comic format.
I'd just move panels around.
ALSO apologies for text wall, but got exited talking about the technical stuff haha! and hopefully someone learns from my mistakes?
I do something funny here, I do pages with very little panel, I'm not going to show you my pages for advertisement, but rather to show you what I do from a technical stand point, and it's pretty much a hybrid of both ideas.
I have bigger panels for easy online reading, but I also plan to print this one eventually.
Also I try to approach page design with amore illustration type of mindset I try to have the least amount "semi panels" because I don't actually use the typical shapes to frame the picture, but rather use shapes of the environment, the bodies of the characters and the darkness itself. This though it's more dependent on what type of story you are telling.
These are my first experiments on this method.
!! Of course this is for a japanese comic format, and not a tapas/webtoon one.
It is a huge pain in the ass, so much so that I do it opposite style now--so I'm starting in scroll format, saving every single panel in a different file, and then putting them together after. Like it does mean I sacrifice a lot of the fun I could've had in page format, but like...I'm probably never going to print this comic so whatever. I also draw each panel very large. (so 8.5 inches wide, 300 dpi) This is because vector drawing bogs up my computer so I have to rasterize anyway before I add colors, and also because I've found that I want flexibility when it comes to comic sizes, and you can make something smaller, but if you make something bigger, it will get really blurry.
Also, the style you use will affect whether or not it can become a scroll comic. My previous comic was a page format comic that was in a european inspired newspaper style a la Tintin. So, it had very thin lines and fairly loose linework. Since a lot of panels were quite small, when it came to putting into scroll format, I couldn't do it. The lines blurred right out and it was very difficult to read full size on a phone. It took so long to make it work for scroll that I just said "screw it" and basically stopped. It took like hours and hours and wasn't worth it for such a lackluster result. So, I finished the page format comic and decided to do a scroll format comic later with a different comic.
Another issue is how to deal with wide panels. I love wide panels in page format, it makes the page sing. In scroll format it's like...you can chop it up into different panels, you canhave it an angle and obscure half the panel, or you can just like...tilt your phone to the side, I guess. It's not ideal for horizontal panels, so I basically realized I had to redraw them. Also if you have a page format comic that does abstract compositions where panels are on top of other stuff, then like...it's hard to chop up, you have to redraw everything that was under the panels you never intended to have anything under.
Overall, depends on the comic if it's an easy thing or not. I've heard others say it was easy breezy to transition their comic from page to scroll. For me it was a no, I just had to do a scroll comic that was meant for scroll from the beginning because IMO it's a lot easier to do scroll->page than page-> scroll and it's all because the panels aren't so intertwined.
Reformatting from print to scroll can be a challenge, but I've found a few things that work well for me.
I've started gridding my panels to be more vertical.
I also save the pages out without text, then crop them by panel and reformat to a vertical format. I use InDesign for this, but of course, there are many different programs that can work. Then I go in and add the speech bubbles on top.
As others have mentioned, it's much easier to not have panels that overlap, because you don't have to redraw parts if you separate them for scrolling.
Here's an example of the print (attached) vs its mobile counterpart (linked):
I am a writer, but I worked on a comic that was done for print and we then turned it into a digital format, and I have also worked on a comic where we did the opposite. We created the comic for digital scroll and then attempted to do a print version of it.
I have no hints to offer as I didn't do any of the work, only saw the final result and offered my opinion on some positioning, but I can offer you my experience that might help you decide on how to proceed.
Either way it sucks and it is a LOT of extra work. There is no avoiding it and it will NEVER be good enough for both versions. Sorry to tell you, but one of them will always be lacking. You need to decide what your aim is with the comic, a print or digital, and then proceed accordingly. Accept the fact that you can't make both work, and focus on making a perfect comic in your chosen format, while knowing that when you transfer it to the other format style, it will be inferior to your original.
When the print was transferred to digital, each panel was cut individually because all the lettering needed to be redone so it was big enough to offer a pleasant reading experience where you didn't have to squint your eyes or zoom in to read it. This created an issue with wide panels as they were too small when placed on the digital scroll format and a lot of the detail was lost. So wide panels that look great on print will not look that good on digital. Each individual panel was then placed one under the other, altering the spacing between them based on the pacing each story had.
For the digital format, we took advantage of drawing long panels that extend beyond a page and create a great effect for digital comics, but those images had to be butchered when transferred to print. Also, you never have wide panels, the best you can have is a large square panel and I think it was an even bigger hassle to create a print layout from a digital comic than the other way around.
If you want to see some of that work then visit the website and checkout the comics.2
"Last Moments" was a print comic we transferred to digital.
"Missing Pieces" is a comic we designed for digital from the start, and even though I can't show you the print version, you can see how the way we approached the panelling changed because of the new format and how that would not realistically work if you tried to create a print format.
Fun little extra thing, I actually wanted to try and see if I could print comics on a scroll, like an ancient Egyptian document, as that would allow me to transfer my digital comic to print format without sacrificing anything and having them both look great.
Try reformat from vertical to printing format. I'm sure there is a place in hell where bad people does this forever and ever.
My tip is using an easier panellling. No layered frames, no empty ones, pouring along the page... try to use as much vertical panels as possible, since horizontal spreads will lose a lot of their impact in scroll format, unless you rotate it (which I'm not exactly a fan of, but many action webtoons authors use it...).
I don't bother reformatting it for vertical scroll
I know it's people's number one gripe with my comic but maaan I just don't got time for that!
idk how people do it or find time to change the format. ;;;
The only time I reformatted for scroll was when I was doing a featured Webtoon and I haven't done it since really but I'm thankful for starting that one in page format because I make more money off of my print books than I did on Webtoons.
I DID put another comic on WT as a test that wasn't reformatted and it got around 20k subs in a few months but I think it only worked because I keep my panels VERY not complex so they're pretty legible still even in vertical scroll. No one has every complained that they're not in vertical scroll and nobody who prefers page format has ever complained that my panels aren't ~complex~ enough. At least not that I know of.
I don't reformat anything really now except my six panel comics for IG but that just takes a couple minutes for me to do and isn't a big deal! I think I've developed an audience that understands the book is the final product, not its existence on a website.
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