A Quick View of Landscape Comics

As described earlier, I’ve decided on a basic layout and template for a digital comic. What I didn’t explicitly state before is that I’m going to use a landscape mode rather than portrait for a couple of reasons, but landscape mode present certain challenges.

Flipping between landscape and portrait is too confusing, except if that were the intention. The point is to build a certain rhythm to the comic through the use of panel designs, word balloons, and actions. Landscape also makes sense given the medium. Visit most web comics that use the portrait mode used in print, and you’ll find yourself scrolling, which I think affects the rhythm. In particular, I think intuitively people look at the whole ‘page’ whether it’s in print or online and get something from that overall design. Also, my personal experience with mobile comics is that portrait is not as satisfying as landscape, the latter of which seems to provide more space.

The challenge is that landscape doesn’t provide a type of page flow that portrait does.

First, let’s look at a few of the common layouts and grids used for landscape comics:

Undoubtedly, landscape provides several interesting possibilities. But its very orientation implies a certain rhythm that is different from a portrait layout.  Wide panels generally suggest a longer period of time, and the landscape mode is itself wide, but it can be divided into narrow panels to convey brief moments in time. It seems possible, even unavoidable at times, to have a quicker rhythm with landscape modes, because you can fit more panels from side to side and because the reader’s focus does not have to travel vertically. The landscape mode seems great for focusing on action, like newspaper strips.

But I think the loss of the vertical makes it difficult to have a contrast of brief moments and a lingering, long shot of time.

Here are a couple of examples of what I’m talking about, where I’ve indicated the page flow in a red line, which could be defined by word balloons, actions, and focal points.

If an artist used the large space without border panels, the effect is heightened, as that would suggest a certain timelessness. Each of these example layouts suggest a falling tempo, like a sustained note. I can and have seen this flow and layout used to show actions that lead to a prolonged moment or action, such as a conversation in which one person says something pointed that makes the other character pause and think.

The landscape mode doesn’t easily afford that kind of falling flow. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but I think it requires even more of a design challenge. For example, a landscape layout could get something of a falling flow in this way:

But it still feels shorter than in the portrait mode.

Another challenge of the landscape mode is the use of successive wide panels. In a portrait layout, I’ve seen artist use 4 or 5 wide panels. In a landscape layout, I frequently see 2 wide panels, maybe three.

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