This week's poll was suggested by icassop. Do you vertical strips of panels like webtoons or the more traditional layout of a page of manga?

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Favorite time of day
Choices:
Morning - votes: 247 (8%)
Noon - votes: 110 (3.6%)
Afternoon - votes: 252 (8.2%)
Evening - votes: 522 (17%)
Sunset - votes: 322 (10.5%)
Night - votes: 1309 (42.6%)
Dawn - votes: 309 (10.1%)
There were 3071 total votes.
The poll ended: October 3rd 2021

Lots of night owls here. Or maybe that's because the daytime is when the bad stuff happens (school, work, etc)

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It really depends on the screen and the amount and size of text (especially smaller ones) mmm...

- For smartphone screen I always use regular pages mmm...
- For manga with some text especially smaller one, I prefer using vertical panels, fit width mmm...
- For manga with very little or big text, regular single page, fit to screen mmm...

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Regular pages allow for a much more varied panel layout.

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Even though i mostly read webtoons lately I actually prefer to tap through regular pages, because when scrolling webtoon i sometimes miss a tap and now need to find spot where i was again

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Regular pages because there's visual clarity no matter how interesting the panel composition is (and double-page spreads are extra hype as fuck).

When scrolling through vertical panels, either the author is forced to use extremely bland layouts with tons of whitespace between panels, or there's a mess of visuals as you scroll through and the top of a panel or two reveals slowly before the rest of it.

I'm kind of disgusted that nearly 40% of people choice vertical panels lol. Even my favorite webtoon, tower of god, would be made so much better by the better panel composition allowed with regular pages.

Actually, I don't really mind whether it's regular pages or vertical panels.. I love both ReLIFE and SpyxFamily, for example.

But for this poll, I'll choose regular pages. I read lots of webtoons lately, but regular pages gives more room to variety of panels, and with a full-page form, it makes the story more fluid and easier to read. As mentioned by the person above me, usually there are a lot of empty spaces between panels in webtoons, and I have to admit sometimes it disturb the flow of the story.. 😅

Last edited by mallika23 at 7:07 am, Oct 3 2021

I thoroughly HATE the looooong strips, that are here termed as vertical panels. (a term that would seem to describe regular pages as well, as well as simple 4-koma-strips, and seems far too vague and broad, IMO. Seems to cover everything but the "Western" horizontal strips that are just like 4-koma, except horizontal)

They are just plain annoying. Why anyone ever uses them, or likes them, I will never understand.
I see plenty of drawbacks, and exactly zero benefits.

Some places where you can read (scanlated) manga online, load all of the pages of a chapter, one after the other, so that you scroll down for the next page, which you might say is like those "vertical panels" …but no. No it isn't. Scrolling down, page by page, is fine. Vertical panels are practically intolerable.

I put regular pages, but not sure why people are hating on vertical format? There some cool things you can do with those. The fade in and fade out by putting a gradient looks really natural, you cannot imitate that with regular pages. You can also force readers to actually take time over a scene because they have to scroll through everything, whereas in one piece I generally skip over the 15 reaction shots and the big buildup to the large panel is wasted since it's already right in front of your face. I've seen some cool scenes with tall stuff like towers or fruit stacks, a panel looking up to the clouds isn't as cool as panning from the clouds all the way to the ground with your own eyes.

I fail to agree, that it cannot be imitated with regular pages. That, indeed, it hasn't been done, long before the "vertical format" was ever conceived of.

…
So what you're saying, is that you don't read manga. You skim them.
…but you don't skim "vertical" strips, but instead actually read through it properly.
Something you could do with regular pages, but simply choose not to, for some inexplicable reason.

I can imagine that, that might be impressive …on a few extremely rare occasions.
And they'd need to be rare, or they'd get very tiresome, very fast.

I highly prefer regular pages, but if a webtoon is created with a vertical strip in mind, then it should be kept in that format.

The worst thing is when manga that were in regular page format gets converted into a vertical strip. Raw Crossing did this for a handful of Doraemon chapters (between ch 78 and 88).
Makes them pretty much unreadable at that point, and ruins a lot of the original authorial intent. Also messes up some of the formatting for art that goes outside of the panel borders.

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I always try to use what ever format is native to the work (which can be a pain when there's no option for it). It helps that the only device I use to view this is my laptop (no smart phones or tablets for me), however, I'm fairly certain I'd do it this way regardless.

I'd be curious as to how/why those loooong strips were made, and why they are, seemingly, popular…