The only time I've had a serious problem with vertical scrolling was when it came to double-page spreads.

This response goes for both Alimeru and zarlan:

When you read by scrolling vertically, you see part of a panel before the rest of a panel. If there's a dialogue bubble at the top, one is quite often inclined to start reading that panel before seeing it all in the screen at once. And don't just say "well actually I scroll so far down in advance that by the time I'm reading any part of a panel, the next few panels are already fully visible", because that actually leads to a worse problem, that you can actually spoil yourself with imagery on the next page before you finish reading the current page. So many great manga-ka use layouts like this, where a surprise visual is right after a page turn, and if you see it before you read the context for it on the previous panel, then your appreciation of the lead-in simply tanks because you're already thinking about the reveal. Therefore, under-scrolling is definitely better than over-scrolling in this case, but as I already covered, under-scrolling still alters your experience.

So, I'm not claiming that this is some fundamentally huge deal--I may have worded it too strongly by saying "fucks up" in my previous comment (though that is how I feel, lol)--because once you've processed the entire panel, your brain will easily correct your understanding of the context for the dialogue bubble you started reading too early. However, in that brief instance, you were processing the story/dialogue without that context, and that does actually impact (and in my view, "fucks up", compared to original author intent) how you experience their panelling. So it's not "a huge deal" but it is still a deal, and that's why I can't comprehend this current poll result. If you're over-scrolling rather than underscrolling, though, it does sometimes turn into a bigger deal. Anyway, I'd expect manga readers to care a lot more about author intent than, say, anime-watchers, for instance. But apparently not, based on this poll result.

Webtoons and the like do exactly what I described in the previous thread--they fill everything with lots of whitespace and make an experience that actually is meant to be read in strictly top-to-bottom order by standard vertical scrolling and so there's no way to preemptively spoil yourself (unless you are outright skipping panels). Which personally, I also don't like (which is why I voted for regular pages in that poll, too). But if you're reading physical manga, digitally, your vertical scrolling is literally altering your experience of the story, every joke, every twist, by not making sure that you capture whole pages at once.

Thus ends my self-righteous rant 😛 For anyone who got this far, I hope you either gained a better appreciation for page layouts, or if not, I hope you one day read a manga that gives you that appreciation, because I would never, ever want to read a vertical-scrolling version of any of my favorite manga (though it doesn't really matter for more boring manga).



That's exactly what it does, yes. Print manga is literally designed so that you'll experience the punch of a page layout all at once, and so two pages at a time gives you exactly that experience. I do read manga on my phone *sometimes*, and it sucks, but on my 4k monitor at home it's just wonderful to have it as double-page spreads with no scrolling.