Some Thoughts About Webtoons and Panelling

The dominant players in the Korean webtoon market: Naver (left) and Daum (right)

This time for my Some Thoughts series, I'll take a break a from the usual post about a specific work or author and instead talk generally about a medium known as webtoons, or as I like to call them, "mobile comics." For those of you who've never heard of webtoons, they're basically Korean webcomics. The language barrier has kept much of it closed off from Westerners, like how manga used to be back in the 80s, but I've noted they've begun to gain some fans overseas through fan-translations of works like Tower of God, Noblesse, or Annarasumanara. Now, you might be thinking, "Well, that's hardly a distinct medium. It's just the term Koreans use for webcomics, which itself is a sub-medium of comics." And yes, that is true, but there's an aspect in this "sub-medium" that makes them distinct to most Western webcomics, which I've already alluded to in my first sentence.

3 examples of the typical webtoon format

I've seen people online wonder why Korean comics have ridiculously long vertical strips. Clearly, they were reading it from the comfort of their PC because it'd be instantly obvious if they were using a smartphone. Webtoons are entirely geared towards reading on the go via smartphones. Yes, you can access batoto on your iphone or read hark a vagrant on your samsung galaxy. That doesn't make them mobile comics. They're just comics you can read from the internet. On the other hand, the very structure of webtoons and the sites that host them are made with smartphone-accessibility in mind.

Can you see the difference?

There's very few horizontal panel flow and small panels in webtoons that require your thumb or fingers to do any more work than necessary. The panel sizes and spaces between them are intentionally formatted so that each "page" consists of only 1 or 2 rows of panels. By that, I mean that your phone's touchscreen gives a nice full view of 1-2 rows of panels at once before you have to scroll down, so that there'll never be a small panel with a dialogue that requires you to zoom in and out. Traditional print-published comics (West or East), on the other hand, use 3-4 rows of panels for each page as the standard. The entire webtoon format is designed to be so accessible that all you have to do is scroll down, which even the most technologically-impaired can do. Of course, webtoons were never designed from the ground-up to be read on smartphones, since touchscreen smartphones didn't exist in the first half of the 00s, which is the early period of webtoons (apparently, the vertical format was adopted mainly because of the difficulties in reading traditional comic-book format stories in the low-res CRT monitors widely used at the time). But that doesn't really make my assertion any less true, since webtoon readership underwent enormous growth from '08/'09, the same time that more and more Koreans began using touchscreen smartphones. I'm not going to talk more about webtoon history, its future, or its popular works and artists. That's not my intention. I'm writing this post to comment on the implications to the overall quality of a comic by the current webtoon model and format adopted by Korean sites like Naver and Daum.

McCloud's brief intro on panelling

Panelling is probably the most overlooked aspect about comics. That's both a good and bad thing. It's good because it means that the artist was skilled enough to create a natural flow that passed unnoticed by readers. But it's also bad because it greatly diminishes one's understanding of comics, making it easy to dismiss it as an artistic medium worthy of critical scrutiny. In the early days of comics, nice orderly grids (whether 4, 6, or 9 panels) were preferred for their clarity and simplicity but like any convention, it was challenged by new generations. These youngsters sought bold angles, non-rectangular panels, and maybe even the elimination of borders.

Rigidity is a tool. It's neither inherently right nor wrong. 

However, in their eagerness for dynamism and experimentation, some moved the pendulum too far to the other side, leaving clarity muddled. Fortunately, as with most trends, the pendulum gradually re-calibrated itself to a new middle-point and there's now a healthy mix of strictly ordered and loose free-flowing panelling in modern-day comics. Still, an important question to keep in mind which arose during this whole debate about which panelling style is best is, "What should panels do for comics? What purpose do they serve?"

These images are taken from other sites, I take no credit

As I've already pointed out, flow is a key function. Panels are like paragraphs in writing. They help break up the mass of info in ordered parts so that your eye can have an easier time processing it sequentially. Western comics which flow from the top-left to the bottom-right corner need to take care that the eye isn't lost if and when their panels transition from right-to-left and down-to-up, the two directions that go against the general flow or "grain," if you will, of the page. For manga, these two directions would be left-to-right and down-to-up. The two images above accomplish this by having the panels work in conjunction with scene composition (mainly body gestures/eye direction in this case) and bubble placement.

This one, I did myself. Sorry, Urushibara.

This is harder said than done. Even skilled artists can screw this up if they don't plan ahead, like the example here in Urushibara's Waters. The numbers in orange denote the intended panel order while the red arrows denote the most likely path your eyes will take (well, that's what happened to me, at least). The problem starts off with the word bubble in panel 3 which juts out past the borders (why, Urushibara? this bubble's got no business crossing borders!). This, combined with the fact that the grandma's face in panel 2 is placed too low, draws the eye from panel 1 to 3. The other main problem is the close placing of the bubbles in panel 3 and 5 cause the eye to skip over panel 4. So instead of the intended 1-2-3-4-5, we get a 1-3-5-4-2 order instead.

Webtoons. Storyboard-like, in a way...

Now let's return to webtoons. [sarcasm]Gee, I wonder if flow problems exist in webtoons...? [/sarcasm] Webtoons, if you don't know, are drawn by eager amateurs (only the most successful would have a chance in getting a deal with publishing companies and turning pro). While the artists' inexperience might cause them to slip up if they were confined to a more traditional layout, the vertical format of webtoons are so simplistic you'd have to be a genius deconstructionist to fuck it up. They're like newspaper comic strips or 4-koma manga. So if flow and simplicity are key to panelling, then webtoons reign at the top of the comics pyramid, right? No. Frankly, webtoon panelling disgusts me. Well, maybe that's a little harsh, but they do strike me as just so very, very bland. "B-b-but why? They're just like my ultra cinematic movie storyboards!" ...so says the theoretical webtoon defender in my head. Ah yes, the appeal to an already critically accepted medium. That's turning out just swell for modern-day video-games, with their press-X-to-see-gameplay-vanish-before-your-very-eyes!

Ping Pong v5 p87-88: Peco vs. Kazama

There's a reason why movies are better enjoyed as well, movies, instead of as storyboards. In motion, timing dramatically impacts the storytelling. While you don't see it on the Jurassic Park storyboard above, it's standard practice to put in the timing for scenes in an animation storyboard. The 6+0 you see in the Tokyo Godfathers storyboard above denotes 6 seconds+0 frames out of 24. A useful tool for anime directors, but not something a comic artist can use. Can you seriously imagine reading a note by each manga panel telling you how many seconds you should spend looking at it? That's why if a comic artist is to impart some sense of timing on his readers, he has to do it entirely through panelling, specifically in the panel sizes and spaces between them. Take a look at the example from Ping Pong above. In p87 (left), Matsumoto Taiyou breaks down the match into smaller and smaller panels so as to lead your eyes quicker and quicker but just as you flip the page to p88 (right), you're greeted by one giant panel. Since your eyes naturally spend a longer time looking at bigger panels than smaller ones, the transition to the entire page-sized panel suddenly slows down your eyes from speeding through, hopefully giving the "slowed-down time" effect of Peco flying. A similar example can be seen below.

Ping Pong v5 p119-120

Panel sizes aren't the only thing that matter for timing. Take a look at this example from Asterios Polyp below.

The page on the left has a strict grid layout with both panels and the spaces between panels being uniformly sized. With no space on the page larger or smaller than the other, the reader is likely to spend an equal amount of time on each panel (I'm ignoring the length of dialogue since it's a little outside the scope of my post). Meanwhile, the page on the right minimizes the space between panels for the bottom row, using only thin purple lines. Hence, the eye might linger or do a quick look-back to the previous panel when traversing the larger white barrier between panel 3 and 4, but it will flow smoothly and quickly from panels 4-7.

Examples from Habibi

Lastly, panels by themselves can impart meaning, even before they're filled up with art. In the left page above, the central rectangle surrounded by other panels establishes its commanding importance, which is perfect for depicting a scene in which the protagonist's central struggle is to save an abandoned baby. Meanwhile on the right, the panels themselves already suggest waves even before the water is inked in.

Ughh...

Alright, having said all that, I hope you can now understand why I dislike the overuse of uniform "cinematic" rectangular panels and gratuitous use of spaces between them that webtoons seem to promote. But I'm being a little too harsh here. There's nothing set in stone that a webtoon artist has to draw in these bland ways. The only thing I feel that the webtoon format wholly eliminates is the double-page spread (Annarasumanara baaaaadly needed it). Yes, it is possible to just turn a phone sideways, but the result still looks way too cramped (not everyone uses a tablet), forcing you to zoom in/out if there's dialogue, which is the last thing a webtoon wants you to do.

3 "pages" that I merged side by side

In any case, you can still find a few webtoon artists who're working with the traditional page format. There's also other artists who really try to make full use of the web in webtoon by implementing javascript triggers to insert animated sequences, background music, and other things normally impossible on a piece of paper. People complain that there's too few genuinely scary comics, so it's nice when something like Bongchon-Dong Ghost comes along to scare the bejesus out of even seasoned internet veterans. Also, aggregating eager comic artists in one site to help them reach a wider audience is a pretty good idea in and of itself, something that France seems to have picked up by setting up the site Delitoon, which claims inspiration from the Korean webtoon model. I just hope more of their artists pay attention to what creative panelling can do for their comics.

P.S. If you can read French, Le Roi Banal's a nice short read on Delitoon.