Webtoon (Vertical-Scroll Comics)

ウェブトゥーン（縦スクロール漫画） / 2003– / Layout / Reading on the Web

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.

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

Webtoon (Vertical-Scroll Comics) — 縦一列に流れる第2世代ウェブトゥーンの画面 2014年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — 縦一列に流れる第2世代ウェブトゥーンの画面 2014年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 ／チョ・ソク《心の声》2006年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Webtoon (Vertical-Scroll Comics) — チョ・ソク《心の声》2006年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — 縦一列に流れる第2世代ウェブトゥーンの画面 2014年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 ／チョ・ソク《心の声》2006年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary entry

Best used for: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
Further study: コマ間の空白が時間の長さや場面転換をどう担うかという議論 / 縦に極端に長いコマが、読む時間と語られる時間を重ねる仕組み / 日本や米国のウェブ漫画が紙の版面を保ったのに対し韓国だけ離れた経緯

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