Webtoon is also a great place for independent artists to grow an audience and thrive, which is how Smythe found success. I’ve learnt a lot about visual storytelling from working this way. I can make a moment really impactful by having a full width, full screen panel to really showcase an important story element. I also really enjoy the element of surprise you get with the vertical scrolling format. And there’s less pressure involved in typesetting! If a moment needs a lot of space for pacing, the vertical scroll lends itself really nicely to be able to easily expand or condense panels depending on what kind of effect I’m going for. I really like working with the vertical scrolling format because It gives me more freedom within my storytelling. As in, the way comics are laid out and the conventions of dialog bubbles were almost physically painful for my brain to process. But the biggest hurdle for me in reading comics is that they were literally hard to read. Just figuring out how to buy them felt like learning a foreign language, and a lot of the artwork and the way many mainstream comics objectify women was a turn off. But getting into actual comic books was always daunting to me. I know from the amount of time I’ve spent crying over the MCU and loving the Arrowverse that comic characters and their adventures are my catnip. So, we’ll start with my dark geek confession: I’ve never been able to get into comic books. This little app and ancient story did something I didn’t think was possible: made me love comics. But its most vibrant interpretation can be found as the most popular story on an app I’d never heard of until a few months ago: Webtoon, where Lore Olympus is the jewel in its crown. From a Broadway musical, to tumblr memes the ancient tale of the God of the underworld and his stolen bride is all over the internet. You’d think a story that’s a few thousand years old wouldn’t be gaining new fans in our modern era, but the myth of Hades and Persephone is seeing a resurgence lately that almost feels like divine intervention.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |