While you’re waiting for me to finish the Valentine’s Day 2020 comic, I’ve been doing some testing with possible mobile comic formats. Help out by testing them out with your phone/tablet, then tell me your opinions and suggestions in the comments or polls below!
Links to those pages have been removed! Thanks to everyone who participated!
In order of how easy they are to implement:
Horizontal Scrolling
Comics can now scroll horizontally. Work involved depends if I upload bigger comic sizes to compensate for the zoomed-in comic. Looks pretty nice in either orientations, I can actually implement this right now if you guys don’t care about the image lower quality!
Rotate
The comics, just rotated 90 degrees. I still have to upload a separate file for each comic with this method, but at least all I have to do is rotate and export them. Oh, and just before someone suggests it, I did try rotating the whole comic navigation + comic with CSS, but too bad the rest of the page’s elements don’t adjust automatically. If that worked, this would be a way easier fix than Horizontal Scrolling.
I’m not too keen on this though since you have to set your phone to portrait mode, it’s hard to switch into a different format if I change my mind later, aaand my inner web designer is telling me this is stupid.
Manga/Rectangle page
Upload new versions of the comic strip in a manga-like rectangle format. Gonna take a lot of work to convert the strips into this. The benefit with this is I might be able to use this in physical prints, though the page you can see is still a bit shorter than an actual (Shonen Jump) manga page. Around 20% shorter to be exact! I was thinking of changing Cat Nine’s format to something like this, but I’ll think about it more seriously after the current episode is over.
Related to this is the square format like with the Mega Myan VS Bakunawa comic. Fits in most places and super easy to share in sites like Instagram, but it’s a lot more limiting than it looks. I’m sure you’ve seen some comics that would be a lot better if they cut one or more panels for their joke… and if not, just check out r/comedynecromancy for some examples. You could argue that they just need to level up their humor, but some comics need fewer panels, and that’s often not possible with a square format. Finally, I want to reserve this format for bonus comics, for now. Why am I using it then? Well, it just looks so nice in the home/blog pages ain’t it?
Webtoon
Some of you should be familiar with this mobile-optimized, super-long, vertical comic format. Downside is, like the manga page format, this will take some time to convert and upload. The benefits of this is I can upload this to websites LINE Webtoon, Tapas, and MangaDex. I suppose it does look great on mobile, though I’m not a huge fan of this since you can’t really be creative with the panels… though I’ll admit, I haven’t played with creative panels recently, so this might be a moot point. Lastly, you can drop some panels if needed, unlike the square format. A neutral point is I can just rotate the long horizontal panels I’ve used in Cat Nine. Not ideal, but it will do!
I was supposed to put up an Opinion Stage poll here, but they apparently have a 250/month view limit now with the Free version. They’ve become extremely greedy these past years, geez. Gonna use Straw Poll from now on!
Poll closed and removed!