To create resolution-independent files for artwork, we can once more export from drawing apps like Adobe Illustrator directly into SVG graphics. While some artw

To create resolution-independent files for artwork, we can once more export from drawing apps like Adobe Illustrator directly into SVG graphics. While some artwork will always need to be raster based, you’d be surprised by how much of the ink-based digital comics art already being produced can be expressed as vector artwork. By making some changes to the artwork creation and production process, artists and production specialists can generate much more versatile, optimized assets for building comics. I have been working with Illustrator as my main medium since 2000. I have, in fact, done comics in Illustrator. My experience is that anything complicated enough to be a decent comics page is bigger as an SVG than as a bitmap. Somewhere around 200-300 DPI is when it usually starts to break even in my experience. With really complicated pages, it’s worse. A fully painted page is going to be chock full of bitmap effects and stuff that SVG has no clue how to store compactly. Also holy crap I do not want to start laying my panels out with CSS and doing my type with HTML. No, just no, it’s a visual composition process and I do not want to start wasting my time typing numbers. The idea of a responsive layout is noble but about five people are going to try doing this, ever, unless these concepts can be wrapped up in an easy-to-use visual editor, probably one that feeds into a comics hosting site. And that flash of all the word balloons without the images in the demo comic is definitely a glitch that needs fixing, as is the fact that every page has a header I have to scroll past - this is an error so many people doing Web Comics perpetuate from ComicPress. Maybe someone here will want to help write that editor and build that hosting site and maybe it’ll do well enough to compete with Webtoons, but I’m not holding my breath. I will also note that this discusses “infinite canvas” ideas near the beginning. I spent four years doing a horizontally scrolling infinite canvas story and the main response I got was people complaining that their fucking mouse scroll wheel doesn’t work and that it’s hard to scroll stuff horizontally. Seriously it got brought up again recently and the only comment I got was someone calling it a “UX nightmare” because it was slightly too tall for the viewport of whatever they were using and they couldn’t figure out how to scroll properly. And then sites like Webtoon came out and made everyone want stuff on a phone to be vertically scrolling single panels. Nobody wants to scroll in any direction but vertically any more. It’d be hilarious if I hadn’t spent four years of my life on a horizontally-scrolling comic.