landscape or portrait

edited December 2012 in The Toolbox
What is your ideal comics format without regard for commercial concerns or production. You don't have to worry about shelving or monitor resolution, only art. Landscape or portrait? 2x3 or 3x4? (or something else). Serial or done-in-one? Scroll or codex?

Comments

  • Portrait. Good old-fashioned standard comic book pages. And manga pages. But I really like portrait. 
    I like stories with endings but they can be looooong stories. I have no problem with a 21-volume manga series, or a 4-page mini-comic. Whatever the story needs. 

  • Portrait, any size...I like digest size and magazine size the best though.

    After years, yeeeears of being a "screw singles, bleeh!" OGN/webcomics snob, I'm finding on a recent project that I am absolutely in love with writing self-containedish 16 pagers.


  • Portrait - -a variety of ratios and sizes, really.

    Done in ones or short serials with endings.

    ~R
  • I like landscape... it makes me think of a film screen.

    But I obviously like portrait, as well.

    I like mini-series because I like things to END.

    However, as a creator, I would also love to have a long running ongoing series.

    I guess I'm all over the map.
  • Portrait...and I prefer a complete reading experience, regardless of length. 

    Even if your story is serialized, which is fine, I prefer some sense of closure/resolution at the end of each chapter. 
  • edited December 2012
    It depends on what story is being told, the right format for the right story.

    Again, same with singles vs trades. Some stories work best as singles and are told in an episodical manner whereas some stories work best as a trade. It's all in the beat and pacing of the story. It's like trying to compare a TV show with a full length feature. The stories are just different.

    In an ideal world, I'd love to see the art book take off. For example, if I had the where with all, once I was finished my Space Trucking series, I'd love to release it in a 1940's style rocket ship made out of cardboard. But I love seeing books as art objects where the art helps to set up the mood and feel of the story that they are trying to tell.
  • edited December 2012
    I prefer portrait over landscape, because it gives more page layout options.  Working landscape all-but-requires sticking to the format of Sunday newspaper strips (two rows)... maybe with a full-height panel on the left.  Portrait allows doing either full-width or multiple-panels on each row, at will, plus other non-grid layouts that follow the left-to-right/top-to-bottom rules.

    For the most part I prefer the done-in-one approach to storytelling.  (As a reader I hate serials.  They're OK for TV, because who has time/endurance to watch 100 hours of Babylon 5 in a row, but don't ask me to spread 250 pages of comics across a year. Ongoing episodic shows (e.g. Star Trek, Seinfeld), alright, but ongoing serials... no fucking thanks.)  As a writer, the only exceptions to this are episodic stories like the Tales – where the plot doesn't need to carry thru from one to the next – and one graphic novel that I began writing years ago with the idea of it being a 12-issue mini-series.  I like the every-24-pages issue breaks that I mapped out for it, and the idea of breaking it into 12 parts has some thematic appeal (the hero is famous for having 12 sidekicks)... but I'd be just as happy to have them as simple chapter breaks instead.
  • Portrait seems to be the consensus. I'm not sure that I agree that you have to stick to a two tier format for landscape... I'll bet that if you tried, you could come up with varied layouts, but it hasn't been done as much certainly. I prefer 3x4 over 2x3 personally. It feels roomier to me.
  • My buddy Josh was saying that landscape was the way webcomics were headed, since they're "easier to read on a tablet or monitor" (his words, not mine). His recommendation was the write in screens - horizontal increments that, when arranged in a print edition could be stacked to fit into a portrait page.

    I argued against this, since 1) I don't want to write that way, and 2) I don't know that page orientation is trending the way he thinks it is. If you want to do portrait, do that. If you want to do landscape (Mike Norton did this very successfully with Battle Pug, and got it published landscape) then do that.

    My recommendation would be to keep it consistent, especially across media. If you post in portrait, then print in portrait - and vise versa.
  • @TrevorAMueller - I'm mixed on the portrait/landscape web thing. Yeah, landscape is screen dimensions, but at the same time, scrolling down to read more anything isn't exactly an alien concept to people with computers.

    That said, there's definitely a sweet spot in terms of how much scrolling is worth it, and I don't hate the thing some folks do, where they've got a portrait page that they cut in half horizontally, and post as two smaller landscape joints.
  • I predict the next big thing will be circular layouts. Followed by trapezoidal in 2015.
  • When the stars are right, we can start laying out pages using non-euclidean geometry.

    Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!


    ~R
  • edited December 2012
    Yes, and this whole discussion will be redundant once we get those direct brain feeds.

    Anyway, I prefer portrait both as a writer and as a reader. While it's possible to vary a landscape layout, it only makes sense when the page is big enough. I've done some experimenting in that direction, and I still don't know how to present that comic properly. Breaking down a page into halves for the online presentation doesn't make sense to me for two reasons:
    1) You're blocking yourself from good layout opportunities which will lead to a staler print layout;
    2) You'll end up with only half a page's worth of content for every update.

    As for the aspect ratio - they both have advantages and disadvantages. 2/3 sure looks better, but 3/4 leaves more room to do stuff with. The European format is somewhere in-between, 1/1.41, and while it does look a little plump after reading a lot of US comic books, it's not that bad.

    As a reader, I like the way a portrait-format book handles. Whereas, at least for paperbacks, landsapes can feel kinda unstable. I can hold a portrait book in one hand. Landscapes will wobble out of sight on one side or the other. Online, I don't care either way. On a tablet, I can just turn the tablet, and on the desktop, I can scroll. Just make sure I don't have to scroll in more than one direction and that I don't have to scroll up again to turn the page.

    Oh, and: I hate reading a story that doesn't have an ending. I've noticed that the old habit of writing for the trade has grown into
    a tendency to write for the omnibus, and I keep feeling cheated. At least resolve a sub-plot within the chapter you're presenting. Gimme some resolution.
  • Gimme some resolution.
    When I glanced at this statement, I thought you were talking about display quality. That too.
  • I'm working square right now, and I think i prefer that to anything. It provides many options. If I had to choose between portrait or landscape, I would probably work landscape, though.
  • Back before webcomics were even a thing, I published some of my minicomics in landscape format, just to be different (also, it made sense to me that a zine called Fantasy THEATER would be widescreen). I didn't find it particularly limiting, but there wasn't any great advantage to it either (other than the novelty), so I eventually gravitated back to portrait and have stayed there since. I notice almost all of the narrative webstrips I follow are in portrait format.
  • @joshhechinger This is exactly what my buddy is recommending - taking a portrait page and cutting it in half, then posting the smaller "landscape" images as screens. Then, when you go to print, combining two screens onto a single printed portrait page.

    I don't like that idea, though. It fusses with pacing, and what if I wanted a taller vertical image or a full page splash panel?
  • edited December 2012
    It's a constraint, like with any other format.  What if you're doing a 3-panel strip and you want a full-page splash?  Or a 6-panel grid and you want four equal panels?  Shrug.  If you can live with those constraints, it's a workable approach.  If you can't... that's a different constraint.
  • Yeah, what Jason said, basically. I'm a little more open to it because I never eat up a full page just for a splash anyway if I can help it. I usually just say "biggest panel on the page" or "half page panel".

    That said, I think it works better with a European/magazine page than a thinner US page, both in terms of screen matching and printed page real estate.
  • It's funny that this is being discussed because all the panels in Five Weapons are ALL landscaped.
    Granted, it's on a portrait-sized book.

    I'd imagine a true landscape book would be what Derek McCulloch did on his last Image book called PUG.
    The landscape of the book (standard comic size) was physically longer horizontally.  Basically turned on its side.

    PUG interiors were two stacks high and on each page.  The images didn't go across the gutter.
  • Mike Norton does Battle Pug landscape, and also got it printed that way. Which he said was an impressive feat. I think the publisher didn't want to print it that way, but haven't had a chance to chat with him about it.
  • Some New Kind of Slaughter was a landscape book, which worked for it artistically, but does make it harder to shelf.
  • I always liked what they did with Last of the Independents: landscape trade with a portrait slipcover for shelving.
  • Oh...!  Since Marv brought up SNKoS I guess landscape means the *spine* is on the narrow side.
    My bad, I assumed the definition was just for the interior pages, not the printing-production side.

    That's what I tried to define with Derek McCulloch's PUG -- which had the spine on the short side of a regular sized comic.

    I was talking about the visuals *inside* the book.  My bad.
  • So how do you format a digital comic that has both landscape and portrait pages together? I have that situation in an upcoming comic. The artist (who’s fantastic BTW) did the multi-panel pages in portrait but added several single panel / splash pages in landscape. There are 4 landscape pages out of 24, distributed randomly through the comic. 

    It’s a pdf, so on the iPad or tablets it’s no problem, but on computers it will be awkward to say the least. On previous comics I’ve made the pdf’s with the landscape pages turned 90 degrees so they will be read correctly, but in those cases I could group the landscape and portrait pages together. Here I can't do that, so I’m afraid it would make the final product look clunky. 

    Any suggestions?

  • Have you asked the artist how to do it? Not that I expect him to have an answer, but to make sure he's aware of the problem in the future? :)
  • He's really old school - he works entirely in pen and ink, and does't even have a scanner, so I don't think he's thought through the implications of digital delivery. 

    Good thought though, thanks. I'll tell him so he'll be aware of it for future projects, including his own. 
  • The other option is to have two formats to download - one for tablets and the other for computers. Again, not optimal but it makes it a bit less awkward to read, especially for users that aren't technologically savvy. 
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