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Jul 2016

Do you like reading comics with a lot of space between them or do you bit less space but still vertical format?

On the desktop reading the comic that have a lot of space between a panel is a nightmare for me and make me drop the comic fast. Tho it makes for interesting pacing if you do it right! what do you think?

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    Jul '16
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    Jul '16
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I'm used to reading comics designed for print, so I'm always a little confused when I see comics with a ton of space between panels. In the back of my mind I think "that would be a ton of wasted space if this were ever printed"

And like you said they can be hard to read on a desktop, which is where I do most of my reading.

I'd rather have smaller and more clustered panels so I can see most of the page or even the whole page at once and get the flow of the action.

Yeah I'm not a fan of excessive scrolling, what's worse is if the page is as big as how a print-layout comic should be. If at least one whole panel doesn't fit on my laptop screen, I'm not going to sub. Scrolling so much makes my eyes hurt and makes me nauseous.

Creators who do that format need to realize they don't need to upload their page at 900 px wide, scale it down to like 650. It will still look the same on mobile.

Personally I'm fine with it since my comic is in this format. Though the way I do it is that each panel is almost as big as a screenshot, I don't use a lot of white space unless I'm trying to do a time skip thing from like morning to evening etc. I'm not the best when it comes to how manga-style divide their panels, so the vertical format works best for me. Also side note I have trouble keeping attention when the panel is too cluttered with speech bubble and information. This is why I usually end up watching anime rather than reading manga because I tend to skip a ton of bubble speech and text when I read manga. A good example of this is One Piece... I tend to skip so much dialog when I read it idek why LMFAO On the other hand vertical format with spacing in between each speech bubble and panels works kind of like an anime episode to me. Not too cluttered to the point I will skip over the dialog.

I don't mind vertical. But I REALLY HATE when the artist puts TOO MUCH white space between panels. It's very difficult to read. It's like a whole bunch of very long pauses between lines and I read the dialogue in my head horribly slowly.

Character 1: Don't do thaaaaaattttt...
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Character 2: You can't stop me!!!
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Character 1: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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Character 2 does the thing
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Character 1: NOOOO!!!

It depends on how it's used in the comic. If it's used to show the passing of time or to show extreme reactions I don't mind a lot of empty space. But if the whole comic is set up with a lot of empty space/needless scrolling, I don't care much for it. If used right it can convey emotion or mood very effectively with minimum effort, but if abused it comes off as lazy.


Yeah that is how I feel too! There should not be to much spacing in action scene! works more in a calm scene!

I'm not a HUGE fan of scrolling comics, I prefer comics that read in a traditional way. I can still read them, though, but mostly only on mobile since they are made for that. Some of my favorite scrolling comics are Siren's Lament1 and Miss Abbott and the Doctor. I think they are perfect examples of how a scrolling comic should be done.

I much prefer the scrolling format when reading comics, my comic is like that as well. I think white space can be used very effectively but I hate when it's abused, leaving soooo much space between panels is really annoying.
What I like though is that white space is actually really good in setting the pace of the scene and gives you much more control over it. If it's a slow scene you can add more space between panels to slow the reader down and if it's a fast paced (action scene for example) then you can have the panels closer to eachother.

There's this one time i've been waiting about half a minute for a page to load. Little did I know that the page is loaded already and I just had to scroll up about two pages worth of white screen before it gradated to black. So I don't like it when i'm reading comics on desktop.

Those long pages can work if it's intended to create some kind of pacing, but yeah too often I see people use it to make their comic longer. It'd be like taking a short film and turning it into a feature-length movie by just adding a ton of awkward pauses in the dialogue.
I think those people are trying to fulfill the demands of readers who want longer episodes so they streeeetch the crap outta their comic and obliterate the pacing as a result.

I guess mine is more of a vertical format cuz when I started drawing my comic I was expecting to post it on a manga website like mangareader.net but I then discovered that wasn't possible so the paneling I'm using right now is meant for manga websites where u click on pages to go to the next page and in truth I prefer the vertical style since I read more mangas than webtoons and have acquired a taste for those kinda comics.

I like them when using a mobile, or a tablet; a loooottt easier. On websites it's kind of tiring to be honest.
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I like more comics with "manga" distribution, where the spaces mean something, also not having that many things happening in a page ( for example, the rule of max 6 panels per page). I can read happily comics that dont follow that rule, but I find easy to get lost in the panels without knowing which one comes next. Also, I favour the vertical format, I think is better scrolling.

I grew up reading, and still read, comics in print. I'm used to being able to look at an entire page as a discrete unit, with a beginning, middle and end, and a composition intended to be looked at as a whole.

There are vertically scrolling comics that work great, and that work with the vertical scrolling format in such a way that the flow of panels feels natural - but there are a lot of vertical comics that don't.

Things I see that bother me with vertical comics:

  • Too much space between panels. From years of reading print-comics, my brain is hardwired to interpret wider gaps between panels as "more time has passed" or "this is taking place in a different location than the previous panel". Gutter-width matters.
  • Too large panels. And I don't mean the intentionally very tall panels that are made for you to scroll through to give a sense of a camera panning vertically across the scene: I mean the regular panels that are sized so big that I have to scroll to see the whole thing. Unless they're a vertical camera-pan, vertical comic panels should be sized to fit onto the screen all at once.
  • Odd pacing. This doesn't happen with all vertical comics, but I see it often enough. It's like some creators seem to think that they need to give each action its own vertical space, instead of placing things side by side. Like, a conversation between two characters could be placed as [panel][panel], even in vertical format, but it's instead placed as
    [panel]
    [panel]
    ... which means that a.) the comic becomes longer, vertically, than it needs to be, and b.) if a character says something in the first panel, and another character reacts to in the second panel, there's now a delay to that reaction as the reader has to scroll down to it. If the panels are simply placed side by side, you get the action and the reaction happening closer together, and it makes more sense, pacing-wise.

I've just gone back and reworked every page I've put up so that the spacing between each panel makes more sense. I went with a slightly longer white space, but it's not noticeably long at all, it's more like a baseline tempo between each panel that sets the pace. I sometimes have speech bubbles or narration in those white spaces, which I think is a great effect if used sparingly. It really emphasises what's being said.

Doing it that way also means it's now much more obvious when I lay panels on top of each other, which of course means a much faster pace.

I think long, scrolling verticals are the future for webcomics, and by ignoring the different ways you can utilise the format to enhance your story will probably only hurt your comic in the long run.

Uh-oh. My comics have that kind of format :")
I neglected manga page format since line webtoon became popular in my country ._.

My comics happen to be a little longer than many on several pages. I try not to overdo it too much (I try my damndest not to go past 22 panels in one page!) because I know for me personally, endless scrolling can be tough to work with especially on a desktop. I don't know if it's just me but I lost my place easily if the page is excessively long and if the panels are too large.

I'm a little torn about long panel distances.
They do kinda feel like real-time pauses when they aren't too long, so that's can feel immersive to me. Kinda like a movie timing-wise.

I still prefer the print-esque panel distribution as long as there aren't a lot of panels in a row horizontally.
Well, it is less work for the scrolling muscles. @__@