Mainstreaming Comics: Hell Looks Like Guided View
Watching a blockbuster on your mobile phone isn’t the same as the big-screen experience, but at least it’s an honest approximation. Try and read a simple comicbook on your mobile, though, and you may be prompted to partake in the nauseating pan-and-scan nightmare known as “Guided View”.
Guided View is the ironic punishment badly behaved comicbook fans will face in the afterlife. Because the standard 25.7 cm x 16.8 cm does not (even slightly) fit on the screen of the average mobile phone, or even on small tablets, an alternative viewing mode was devised that breaks up the page to show only one panel at a time.
But comicbooks are designed page-by-page just as much as panel-by-panel. Some comics and graphic novels do not even have panels, or have panels that blend together so intimately that they cannot be separated without compromising or misinterpreting the art.
Even books that have straightforward panel layouts will use the placement of panels across the page to heighten their impact or convey a subtle message. This impact or message is lost in a panel-by-panel read.
It is not even as if we are talking about experimental or non-linear comics here. Guided View is not even able to deal with the basic, everyday language of comics. Simply processing different sizes of panel is beyond its powers: you, the reader, will have to contend with constantly changing text sizes, awkward cropping and cutting, inconsistent management of backgrounds, a “camera” that could swoop in any direction whenever you tap for the next panel — and still some panels are unreadable without further zooming (or turning your phone on its side).
You don’t have to read a comic on your mobile using Guided View. The alternative is, of course, to simply manually zoom in and out on each panel — but you’d just be doing the same thing that Guided View attempts, but slower and with more strain on your fingers.
The fact is that comics were not designed to work with mobile phones: the two are not compatible. That’s a shame. Not only for me, but for fans, potential fans, and for the profits of the comics industry.
The future is digital, and the future is mobile… No wait, sorry — that’s the present. I got confused because comics are so often stuck in the past.
The goal of UX, or “user experience design”, is to delight your users/customers. The mobile comics experience today is fundamentally undelightful. If I was not already a comic fan, if this was my first introduction to the comics medium (and why wouldn’t it be? — we do everything else on our phones, why wouldn’t we expect Marvel Unlimited on our phone to be as easy to enjoy as Netflix is for film and TV?) I might bounce off comics hard.
Webtoons
The highest grossing comics apps on the mobile apps stores are not the Marvel or DC apps. Even if you think of those companies as primarily traditional paper publishers you’d still expect any place where you can buy Spiderman comics and Batman comics to dominate that marketplace.
Yet it’s not American comics, but Korean ones that seem to win the app-store war with apps like Line Webtoon, Tappy Toon and Lezhin Comics.
These Korean “webtoon” apps do something pretty simple: they publish comics designed for viewing on mobile devices. You scroll through the story from top to bottom. Without the barbed wire of Guided View getting in your way, or the finger-exhausting work of pinch-and-zoom, you can simply get immersed in the story and the artwork. It’s a pleasure.
I like webtoons. Currently, I’m getting through season one of the (truly) epic (ie. long as fuck) action story Tower of God by Lee Jong-hui, and the utterly charmingly illustrated near-future teen-drama Seed by Said Polat. But sometimes you’re craving a comic, your mobile is the only thing you have with you, and you want to read about the X-Men or Bats. I wish for a world this was possible with the same smooth reading experience offered by Line Webtoon.
I don’t know the history of Korean comics, or “manhwa”, but Wikipedia implies that the fates of printed manhwa and digital webtoons have been inversely correlated. That seems to me like the natural order of things. Is the America comicbook industry just too stubborn to admit that it could be something other than it already is? Is it suffering as a result?
Adaptations
If the comic format can’t be read nicely on mobile, then they could at least be adapted for mobile: the artwork rearranged so that it fits into one continuous vertical ream; text resized to be read at the size of the average mobile phone screen.
Now, you’d still have to make artistic compromises with such an adaptation. Ideally, you might bring the writer and artist in to oversee the process, though I don’t see that as being cost-effective in most cases.
Still, one the advantage of an adaptation is that some, or even most, of the artistry can be preserved in the new format with the correct alterations. This isn’t possible with a guided view that only works with the original pages.
If Guided View is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by cutting it to bits, a proper mobile-friendly adaptation would be like sanding the corners of the peg — yes, you’d lose some information, you’d lose some of the original intention, but you still preserve much more than otherwise and it’s a smoother fit overall.
The best way to read comicbook is in the format it is originally written in, but with a mobile adaptation you could get something pretty close to the intention of the original, with a pleasent reading experience and accessible from your pocket.
Here’s one I made earlier
If you’re finding this hard to visualize how this could work, I’ve got a helpful mock-up for you:
…and another:
This is my idea of of what a proper adaptation from comicbook to mobile-comic would look like. The text is bigger, panels are rearranged so that they can be scrolled through vertically, and the space between panels is generally increased for better readability (taking advantage of the infinite space of the digital canvas).
Of course, the artist’s original intentions for the flow of the page has still been broken up, but I feel I have made appropriate substitute decisions that “Guided View” cannot.
You can read the free preview pages of the published, full-size comics and decide for yourself if my adaptation of those pages does them justice:
You can also download the full image files of my Saga and Major X mobile mockups below:
What’s funny is that I put these together in less than an hour each, with only my basic graphical-editing skills, with no planning and no access to the original images. I’m not saying they’re perfect, but I think that they basically work: they are a far nicer to read than using Marvel, DC and Comixology’s apps.
Imagine what Marvel, DC or Image could do if they decided to properly adapt some of their comics for mobile. Other than satisfying me, the potential to capture new audiences would be massive. Everyone has a phone, everyone likes a good story, and the world is already into superheroes.
I won’t say the shitty mobile experience is the only thing stopping comic-books from reaching the mainstream again (price and labyrinthine categorization of stories are also to blame), but fixing it would be a big step forward.
If only comicbook companies would embrace the present.
