Infinite Canvas vs Webtoon (Vertical-Scroll Comics)
インフィニット・キャンバス / ウェブトゥーン（縦スクロール漫画）
Both are comics on the web with no page break, carried forward by scrolling and by nothing else.
How to tell them apart. Width fixed to the screen and panels running down in one column is Webtoon. Extending in any direction, up, down or sideways, is Infinite Canvas.
Infinite Canvas
Scott McCloud's name, given in Reinventing Comics in 2000, for a way of laying out webcomics. The screen is treated as a window onto one unbroken surface rather than as a page, so panels can run in any direction for any distance. Because the medium measures time with space, the gap between panels becomes the pace of the story.
Webtoon (Vertical-Scroll Comics)
A comics layout that grew on Korean portals and runs down a single column. The blank space between panels stops being a mere break and becomes the material, because its length carries elapsed time or a change of scene while it also takes on background colour, falling rain, and even the dialogue lifted out of the frames. Since the reader cannot glance ahead, the act of scrolling becomes the passage of story time.
| Infinite Canvas | Webtoon (Vertical-Scroll Comics) | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2000– | 2003– |
| Family | Reading on the Web | Reading on the Web |
| Kind | Layout | Layout |
| Cues | A surface far taller or wider than any paper format, with no page break anywhere in it / The story slowing where panels drift apart and quickening where they crowd together / Panel runs that step down like a staircase or wind into a spiral, arrangements a page could not hold / One panel dwarfing its neighbour many times over, a range no fixed format would allow | Panels line up in a single vertical column, with nowhere for the eye to move sideways / The blank between panels runs longer than the panels themselves and holds background colour, falling rain, or dialogue / A single panel roughly eight times taller than it is wide, needing several scrolls before it can be seen whole / Full colour from the outset, drawn to one fixed width matched to the screen |
| Best used for | Designing a vertically read comic as a single continuous surface instead of a sequence of pages · Pacing a long explanatory piece by controlling the distance between its beats | Building a story to be read by scrolling, where pacing is designed as lengths of blank space rather than as page turns · Staging a fall or a dive where the point is to stretch out the reader's own reading time |
| Type | Keep dialogue and narration inside the panels rather than pushing them into captions outside the frame. Use one family and let size carry volume. | Dialogue does not have to stay inside the frame, so push it into the blank. Separating narration from speech that way pulls the narrator apart from the character. |
| Composition | Never break for a page, only for the story. Stretch and compress time with the distance between panels, opening the widest gaps in the quietest passages. | Fix the width and extend only downward. Give a long pause a long blank and a tense passage a run of short ones, so the unit of division is the height of the gap rather than the page. |
| Material | Carry the background through the gutters so the surface reads as one drawing. Signal where the reader currently is by shifting the ground color or pattern. | Assume full colour throughout and let the background colour of the gaps set the mood of an episode. Pour a repeating image such as rain or a falling body through the blanks until the edge between gap and panel dissolves. |
| Caution | Expanding in every direction at once because the canvas allows it leaves readers with no idea where to go next; settle on one direction first and add branches only after the spine holds. | Stacking print page layouts one under another turns the blanks back into meaningless slack and disables the pacing mechanism that sits at the centre of the form. |