Learn from Webtoons

Making a comic is hard because in addition to being a writer and a draftsperson, you have to also be a prop designer, actor, set designer, colorist, cameraman, and costumer all in one. That last role in particular is missing from Swolemates, where all of the characters are first year college students that wear plain T-shirts, tank tops, and sweatpants all the time.

I've been reading a lot of Derek "Menswear Guy' Guy's tweets lately, like many people, and one of the ideas he brings up a lot is that clothing is a language. Your outfit communicates things about you to the people who see you: information about your status, occupation, and personality. A comic that doesn't pay attention to the clothing the characters wear is missing out on an opportunity to tell the reader additional information about their characters, which I feel like is happening here.

The reader is told that Dani is a Popular Girl and Shaye is Alt/Nerdy, and while their hair and makeup reflects those characteristics, their clothing does not. Most of the time, every single character is wearing a plain, solid-color T-shirt. Nobody ever wears a pattern or a shirt with a graphic or text on it.

You don't! You look like a video game avatar someone stopped customizing after they finished the hair and face! Which is worse!

The makeover arc the above screenshot comes from is not used for the traditional makeover arc reason of showing the reader the protag in many cute outfits, but to allow Alex and Shaye to bond more and show how Alex is so fit and buff regular pants don't fit her. Which is a missed opportunity to find Alex clothes she looks good in that fit her personal style and aesthetic, and that would distinguish her from the rest of the cast.

The desaturated color palette doesn't help either.

After this sequence, Alex and Dani both go right back to wearing plain solid-color t-shirts, and occasionally tank tops. The makeover and Dani's interest in fashion are both fleeting and temporary.

A simple change that would increase the realism of everyone's outfits and add personality would be to put graphics on the shirts. Shaye could wear anime merch, Alex could wear video game shirts, Dani could wear college merch. If there's one thing I know about college student fashion, it's that everyone ends up wearing shirts they got for free from their school at random events, and nerdy kids wear shirts about the things they like (as a comics major at art school, I found myself in multiple classes where every single student was wearing a shirt from a comic/movie/game they like.)

A more involved change would be to assign everyone a general color palette they tend to wear and make sure they wear things with patterns, prints, and accessories, at least occasionally. Shaye could wear skinny jeans, Docs, band wristbands. Alex could wear streetwear that is both comfortable for her and reflects her video game interests.

The makeover sequence also serves to communicate to the reader that the creator is not personally interested in fashion or clothes and will not be considering them in this comic, which is a real shame because, like I said, clothing is an opportunity to show readers more about what kind of people these characters are, and is an important part of character design. The clothes people wear are often not even about what's currently fashionable (especially these days, with current trends cycling faster than a washing machine), but out of a desire to signal that you belong to a particular group. Like how finance bros all wear those fleece vests, and fans of musicians wear shirts from their concerts.

It's easy to feel intimidated by the amount of history and possibilities fashion opens up in regards to character design, so creators who aren't personally interested in fashion might try to avoid thinking about it because it's easier that way. But if you take the time to do a bit of research and think a bit about what your characters would actually wear, it will pay off.

Also, as a practical consideration, iconic clothes a character wears could become merchandise for your comic later on!

Exercise: Now it's your turn to give your characters a wardrobe overhaul! Draw your characters in their underwear as a base, copy paste that base several times, and draw a few outfits over it. Try to come up with at least 3 daily wear outfits, what the character wears to sleep, a formal look and a first date look. Think about what your characters value in clothing-- comfort, showing off, expressing their personality, belonging to a subculture? Where do your characters get their clothes- do they go shopping with friends, do their parents pick them out, are they wearing a school or work uniform whenever we see them and if so how do they customize that uniform, if they do customize it? Also consider color schemes and recurring motifs.

Webtoon Recs: I want to recommend Cursed Princess Club again because it's not a comic about fashion in any way, but it uses the characters' clothing to communicate information extremely effectively. Everyone's outfits communicate where they're from and what their position is. Everyone from the Pastel Kingdom wears pastels, everyone from the Plaid Kingdom wears plaid, everyone from the Geometric Kingdom wears shapes. Calpernia's crown has a net attached to it to allude to her spider-themed curse. The major characters are also clearly color coded, making it easy to keep track of them in a busy scene. Gwen is green (and her love interest Frederick is a darker green plaid), Lorena is lavender, Maria is powder blue, Jamie is pink. The way they dress reflects their personalities as well, and when special events like balls happen their outfits for those events also help communicate the characters' personalities.

It's not necessary to focus entirely on fashion and clothes to create outfits for your characters that help tell your story better! Also Cursed Princess Club is just extremely good all around.

A comic that is about fashion and using clothes to express yourself (but also about teen drama and gender/sexuality) that I enjoy is Acception. The main character is a fashion/sewing youtuber who befriends a goth girl in his class, but not everyone around him is as interested in fashion as he is. The goth girl's brother, for example, dresses much more casually and simply than she does, and the character designs for everyone slowly change over the course of the comic as people get different haircuts or teenage growth spurts, or decide to try something new with their style as they get older. I especially like how Iris's outfits frequently incorporate butterfly shapes as something she likes to wear.

It's cute and funny, and puts a lot of thought into its details despite having a simpler art style than many webtoons.

Facing the Sun is a comic about a robot and the woman it was assigned to take care of, as well as trauma, identity, and family struggles. And it's really well made.

Stories about robots developing feelings are generally a pretty hard sell for me because the fun thing about robots, to me, is that they are not people, so it took me a bit to get into it but I got hooked and read the whole thing in one sitting and was late to a meeting today because of it.

I really love the colors and the designs of this futuristic world, it's clear the author put a lot of thought into how and why things work the way they do and it looks so good.

GORGEOUS.

Really well-considered vertical scroll compositions as well, especially in the more recent episodes.

I can't think of a reason a comic this good didn't get picked up besides the fact that it's lesbians in addition to being dark science fiction.

Lore Olympus is the most popular Webtoon on the international version of the app and has been optioned for a TV show by the Jim Henson Company, so if you haven’t heard of it yet you may be living under a rock. It’s a “modern” (although the humans are still in ancient times even though the gods are living in modern times for some reason?) retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth in which Hades is a 2000 year old immortal but Persephone is literally 19 (but also immortal). It has a lot of issues, but today we’re focusing on the character designs!

How many different characters are shown in this image? (I compiled this one myself but I got the idea from Bea on twitter to give credit where it’s due)

Go ahead and guess!

Did you guess right?

(The character in the top right is not the same as the character directly to the left of her even though they are almost the exact same color.)

These character designs are not distinct enough to be easily told apart without the use of color coding- they have very similar face shapes and features (eyes, eyebrows, noses, mouths). The distances between their features are consistent, which adds to the feeling that you’re seeing the same face in different colors. They also have fairly similar body types: thin but not flat-chested, fit but not too buff, rounded and feminine.

The early episodes of Lore Olympus exaggerate Persephone’s curves to the point that I was uncomfortable reading them, because they reminded me of that tumblr post that’s like “she breasted boobily down the stairs.”

It gets less extreme as the comic continues, for which I am grateful, but I don’t believe this level of gratuitous sexualization is necessary in a romance comic where the reader is expected to identify with the object being sexualized.

When making a long-running comic with a lot of different characters, you need to make characters the reader can tell apart at a glance. Some ways to go about this which Lore Olympus tends to not do include: different face shapes, different body types, and different facial features.

Another part of character design is the body language a character uses. One of the reasons comics are so hard to make is the artist is expected to be not just a character designer but also an actor playing the role of every single character in the comic. 

Note how all four of these different characters are standing in almost the exact same pose, their hips cocked to one side and their cleavage visible (for everyone except Psyche, second from the left). Smythe uses this pose a lot throughout the comic, although it gets less extremely exaggerated over time. 

Different characters with different personal backgrounds and personalities should stand differently- a proud archer isn’t going to lean to one side to talk to her friend the same way as a human trying to flirt with a god. Different emotions call for different poses. 

Exercise: Redesign the Greek pantheon yourself! Or, if you feel that’s cliche, try designing a line up of characters based on: the Solar system, chess pieces, a deck of playing cards, the tarot, internet websites (the last one is a joke for people who have been on tumblr since 2011 but you can do it for real if you want).

Some things to consider when designing: are the characters you’re drawing related to each other, and if so, how much do you want them to resemble each other for readers to pick up on that relationship? What clothes do they wear, and why do they wear them? (work/school uniforms, want to look nice, don’t care about fashion, etc) Are they short or tall, lanky or stocky, fat or thin, athletic or not? 

Can you tell each character in your lineup apart from every other character in your lineup without coloring them in? How about by silhouette alone?

Webtoon Rec of the Day:

Cursed Princess Club is a comic all about appearances, and its characters are very distinct because of it. I also appreciate the designs of the different themed kingdoms. It’s lacking in body type diversity, but it’s a pretty fun comic with a lot of heart to it, and I appreciate it overall.

Surviving Romance is really good, I love it a lot, and it has such diverse character designs for its core cast. The protagonist is reincarnated as the protagonist of a romance novel that suddenly turned into a zombie apocalypse story (with a bonus time loop mechanic), and to make it out alive she has to learn to see her classmates as people and not just the mindless background extras to her story. And her classmates are all extremely distinct and interesting people.

Pacing is difficult to teach by example because it’s something that develops over long stretches of story, not in single-panel or short sequential screenshots. But bad pacing is the most common reason people drop a longrunning story - “I just got bored of reading it. It felt like I was reading the same thing over and over again.” 

Fortunately for me, who’s never read the comic until prompted to do so while trying to find a good case study for this post, Tower of God has this problem right off the bat!

Tower of God is a pretty old Webtoon about some guy who needs to clear all the levels in a tower to get to a girl he likes. It was recently made into an anime on Crunchyroll. It’s also over 500 episodes long and still going. Each episode is twice the length of most Webtoons, clocking in at the equivalent of nearly 15 print comic pages. And because of this length, it feels as though the story is unfolding glacially slowly. It takes the protagonist four of these extra-long episodes to clear the first level of the tower. The amount of build-up and frequent cutting away to other characters commenting on the protagonist’s trials, instead of heightening the tension of his fight, serve to diminish it by making the fight feel stretched out as well. Long stretches of dialogue and white (or black) space prime the reader to scroll faster to get to the action and might lead to people missing the good bits amidst the fluff.

The formulaic nature of Tower of God’s Level-Up plot means that on a larger scale the story feels even more repetitive, as the protagonist fights a bad guy, moves up to the next level, faces a bad guy it looks like he won’t be able to defeat, unlocks a secret power he didn’t know he had and kicks the bad guy’s ass, and then moves up to the next level again, over and over. We’ve discussed the unsustainability of escalating battle sequences in Lesson 7, and that applies to Tower of God as well. But on a smaller scale, I feel like the fights in Tower of God would land more effectively if they were faster paced, told with bigger splash panels and less unnecessary buildup surrounding them. 

Pacing is also a matter of personal preference, however: Stephen King has said he prefers slower-paced stories. I like stories that move quickly (or at least feel like they do), with things developing and changing in every chapter or episode.

Regardless of if you prefer your comics fast or slow, every panel in a comic must either develop the story and characters, or establish the environment and mood, and if it doesn’t do either of those things, there is no reason for that panel to be in there. 

Exercise: This is based on an exercise I half-remember from Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. Pick a movie you like and grab some index cards! (If you don’t have any index cards draw some rectangles on a page.) Break down the movie into 16 key scenes or events. Now remove half the index cards so that the story still makes sense. Then, get some new index cards and expand each of the remaining scenes into two cards, or even three. How does the story change depending on what you cut or expand? How does the feeling of the story change? Experiment by cutting some things and adding others. The one thing you can’t do is add in things that weren’t in the movie you were thinking of, or rearrange the order of events.

Webtoon Rec of the Day: The Webtoon I always think of as an example of unsuccessful pacing, Cheese in The Trap, is currently a Daily Pass Webtoon, which means I can’t easily reread it or use it as an example. But I did notice something interesting in Soonkki’s new ongoing Webtoon, After School Lessons for Unripe Apples. Instead of long arcs spanning multiple episodes, each episode of ASLfUA consists of several shorter strips stacked on top of each other. It still feels very slow and occasionally repetitive, but when read closely you can see each short strip develops the slice-of-life scenario further, just very slowly. This slow pace is probably not to everyone’s taste, but it works in a way Cheese in The Trap didn’t for me. At any rate, I think it’s an interesting comic to look at if you want to see how a slowly paced comic can work well. 

Caption: Agh! So much glaring white! It burns my eyes!

Above I’ve shown an excerpt from the first episode of The Makeup Remover. That’s not to rag on it--it is one of my favorite webtoons, with compelling characters and nuanced themes!--but this kind of layout is absolutely everywhere among vertical scroll comics, and a common accompaniment to the “talking heads” style of dialogue that was covered earlier on this blog. And it’s easy to see why: single panel compositions are easy to thumbnail and draw (especially when you’re producing 40-50 panels per week), they communicate the action clearly, and using whitespace allows authors to control the pacing via how long it takes to scroll down.

But, well... it’s also pretty boring.

Vertical scroll can be divisive, particularly among fans used to reading traditional page-based comic, but it does have one huge advantage: it is an incredibly dynamic format. And most webtoons utterly fail to use this tool effectively, if at all. Let me explain.

Reading a comic in a page-by-page format is a discrete process. You read a page, then you turn the page, then you read the next page; each one is a separable experience. Webtoons on the other hand are a continuous medium. You can scroll through an entire episode with no format-imposed interruptions between the images, meaning that the whole thing can (and usually should!) feel like a single fluid experience. By injecting large white space between panels, the author is essentially breaking up this continuity, effectively imitating the discrete experience you would get from turning pages. Which can work fine--but it also means you are surrendering all the unique potential of the continuous format.

Lavender Jack is a historical noir-superhero comic that makes brilliant use of its scrolling format to lead you through each episode in a fast paced, cinematic experience.It will often remove panel borders entirely, allowing one scene to bleed into the next through the shadows, resulting in a reading experience that often feels as cinematic and alive as watching a movie. Dialogue will begin over one image and then serve as a bridge to carry you into the next. Newspaper stories bleed into flashbacks. Characters move from one action to the next in the same environment layout. There are so many more ways to get from “one thing” to “the next” without smacking a panel break between them.

Let’s take a look at one of my favorite examples where Lavender Jack uses its vertical scroll to excellent advantage. In episode 12, Jack crashes a fancy banquet, spills some scorching hot tea to the captive upper class audience, and needs to make a quick getaway. He gives the guards the slip, jumps a wall, and dashes through the deserted gardens…

--then BAM! He’s stopped in his tracks by the formidable Detective Theresa Ferrier.

This sequence does a couple of incredible things, so let’s break it down. First,  we see Jack from a bird’s eye view running downward through the panel. His position is shown at several different points in motion on the same background to show his progress running through the garden, so that the reader can follow his progress as they scroll down. Panel breaks aren’t necessary here because the limited size of a phone or tablet screen will break up the image for you--though the panels are continuous, as you scroll you’ll never see more than one Jack on your screen at a time, so it is clear that these are subsequent moments in time rather than a case of spontaneous cloning. He’s also running away from the hubbub of the ballroom scene above, both in the comic and physically on the layout of the page (since the previous screen is positioned above on the page and he’s running down), which makes the geography of the scene easy to follow. The change of tone is good too--after the crowded chaos of the previous banquet scene, the big empty pages make the garden feel quiet and lulls us into thinking that Jack is alone and that he’s almost made it out safely. And then, the comic suddenly shift from a vertical perspective back to a horizontal one in the moment of Theresa’s reveal, interrupting the momentum of the page and shocking the reader as much as the detective surprises Jack. And all this--achieved without a single panel border! Now that’s what I call good comic-making.

When you start looking, Lavender Jack is full of these clever transitions and use of the vertical format. I don’t want to include too many at risk of this post getting too long, but there are several more of my favorites even in just Episode 12 alone. Check out the scene where the shadows on Jack’s face bleed into the guards running down the stairs, or the moment of shock when Jack’s snap attack fails to work for the first time and the background jumps from dark to shocked white. 

Remember: if you’re making comics for vertical scroll, you should be doing more than just trying to replicate a traditional comic experience. Take your format and push it! Try new things! Treat the unique aspects of your format as something that can take your art to new levels and create new reading experiences. I can’t wait to see what you make!

Exercise: Let’s try this for ourselves. Start by thumbnailing a six panel comic page, or else taking an existing page with clearly delineated panels. Now rearrange the panels to be in a vertical format and erase the borders between them. How can you connect the spaces between them in an interesting way? Try using connected speech bubbles, continuous environments, or abstract transitions.

Webtoon Rec of the Day: Am I allowed to recommend Lavender Jack again? I’m pretty sure our gracious blog host has already told you to go read it several times now, so if you STILL haven’t then your homework is to go do that. Right now. Go on, then!

Making a webtoon is hard. The company requires the equvialent of 8 full color print pages a week from most Originals creators, and to keep up with the deadlines, it’s inevitable that shortcuts are going to be used. A common shortcut when it comes to drawing the backdrops of a scene is using premade 3D assets to construct the background, or even buying fully rendered backgrounds from webtoon-building services. This is perfectly understandable, since in most comics, the focus is on the characters rather than where they are.

The issue is when these premade asset backgrounds don’t match the art that sits on top of them. 

Not-so-Shoujo Love Story is a comedy comic about two girls experiencing their first love. It suffers from some pacing issues and some characterization inconsistencies, but is occasionally very funny and also one of three Originals about lesbians, so it gets some points for that. We’re talking about it now though because the backgrounds this comic uses are rendered with far more detail and in a completely different style of lineart and coloring than the characters.

When done deliberately, like with drawings of characters on top of photographs, this can work really well, but here it ends up taking the reader out of the story by being distractingly inconsistent.

Environments don’t have to be detailed. What they have to be is right for your comic. 

I haven’t been reading the new romance webtoon LMLY because my patience for straight high school stories is severely limited, but I appreciate how the environments and characters are rendered in the same clean, simple, graphic style. It feels like the bench and the characters are existing in the same world. 

Some of the other drawing shortcuts LMLY takes (like their approach to rendering dialogue) are a little weird, but they nail the exact level of detail needed to make their environments work.

When people think of comics with good environments, they tend to lean towards lush fantasy and science fiction because it’s easier to be impressed when you’re looking at something complicated that someone had to make up from scratch. (A Webtoon I’m not really keeping up with but which has gorgeous fantasy environments is Little Matcha Girl. This town looks so good.)   

But I think effective contemporary environments are also really commendable, because it is so easy to just drop “cityscape asset pack 3″ into your comic and call it a day instead of putting in the effort to make the background look like part of your comic.

Environments are super hard to draw (speaking from experience here!) But spending a little extra time on making sure your locations match your characters and are specific to your story can go a long way.

Exercise: Artists, it’s time to draw! Writers, pretend you’re writing a script someone will draw for you. Draw your character’s bedroom. Think about the kind of bed they sleep in (sleeping bag? four-poster canopy bed? the same bed they’ve had since they were 5?) and how and why their room is decorated the way it is (did their mom do it for them? is this your character’s first-ever independent apartment? are they an interior designer by day?) Include at least 5 personal effects (clothes, bags, a rug, a poster, a stuffed animal, things like that.)

Webtoon Rec of the Day: I haven’t read most of Little Matcha Girl so I’m not sure if I can recommend it on a story level, but as visual inspiration for environment design you could do a lot worse. A comic I have been reading and enjoying, though, is Maya’s World, which takes place in the Indonesian city of Bandung. The environments are perfectly suited to the characters in them. 

Plum is a very sweet, pleasant, positive comic with creative character and environment designs and an unusual premise that falls apart the longer the comic continues.  

I feel bad saying anything negative about Plum because like, it’s nice. A lot of Webtoons have characters that are deeply unpleasant to each other out of the belief that conflict is essential for storytelling and therefore everyone needs to be mad at each other all the time, but the characters in Plum are kind and friendly and supportive of each other and I really appreciate that. 

The concept is also pretty wacky in a fun way-- our protagonist Plum dreams of becoming the best player in a fictional sport called fruit stacking, in which a pitcher throws fruit to the stacker and the stacker tries to balance the tallest stack of fruit they can, while also knocking their opponent’s stack off-balance in the process.

Do you see the problem yet?

Fruit stacking is not a sport that exists in the real world, and it’s highly unlikely it ever will, so the author is forced to make up how this fictional sport works. Since the story is about Plum and his friends becoming the best fruit stackers in the world, they have to face opponents of progressively increasing ability and difficulty to improve their skills and advance. But fruit stacking is pretty simple mechanically- there’s not a lot of room for strategy when you’re just lobbing fruit someone else gave you at your teammate, or your teammate’s opponent. So as the difficulty level increases, Plum’s team and their opponents both start whipping out supernatural abilities that break the laws of physics even more than stacking up dozens of fruits in one hand already do.

We never actually see Plum and Yubari practicing the special moves they use in their match before it happens- the durian smokescreen pictured above was just as surprising and new to the reader as to their opponents, when it shouldn’t have been because we’re following Plum’s journey and his perspective. The training montage leading up to the match is brief, only three episodes, and it focuses on basic strength training and metaphorical “BE the fruit” training instead of actual fruit stacking maneuvers.

It’s difficult to keep a long running battle or competition-focused series going without constantly ratcheting up. Hirohiko Araki (creator of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure) discusses this in his book Manga: Theory and Practice, where he talks about the pros and cons of tournament arcs in serialized manga. And one of the main problems is that after the hero wins the tournament, they have to start over again from the bottom, and you don’t want to have to write the same story arc over and over. 

To make battles in the same basic structure different, creators do things like invent new fantastical powers for the heroes and their opponents to fight with, and end up losing the readers because the rules for the world stop being clear. I don’t know the limits of what’s possible in the fruit stacking universe, and I don’t know how impressed I should be with everyone’s special abilities because there’s no barometer for me to tell how special they are.

I love sports stories because I love reading about characters who are passionate about improving in an activity they love, and work hard to achieve their goals. I followed Plum eagerly for a few months until it lost me by forgetting what made it fun and interesting in the first place. I feel like fruit stacking as a concept wasn’t very well thought out, and the more fruit stacking battles happened, the more the holes in the idea showed through.

Exercise: pick a sport or game you’re reasonably familiar with (could be speed rubik’s cube solving, could be soccer, something where you know the rules off the top of your head). Come up with three different ways you personally could win at this game, being honest about your level of expertise and the kinds of opponents you might face at a similar level. Now come up with three different ways a character you’ve created could lose at this game, without giving them any additional advantages or disadvantages. What kind of techniques or training could your character undertake to perform better?

Webtoon Rec of the Day: There are very, very few sports Webtoon Originals out there right now (literally 12 of them I just counted), and the only one I’ve read and feel comfortable recommending is Blades of Furry, which also features a fictional sport in the form of battle ice skating (and anthropomorphic animals, and vampires). It’s really funny and really interesting, and battle ice skating works both because the creators use real ice skating as a framework for the fictional sport, and because the sport is only part of the story which is also about the secret romance between two ice skaters.

A Canvas fantastical sports webtoon I also really enjoy is Midnight Furies, about uh, magic basketball, and also grief, poverty, power, adolescence, lots of things. It’s pretty neat!

Odd Girl Out is a comic about Nari Oh and her three cooler, prettier friends as they navigate high school together. It’s a comic that took me a while to get into. The art starts off somewhat wonky, and the pace is leisurely, as it’s a longrunning series with nearly 300 episodes as of today. What kept me reading was the fact that there was actual progression happening. Characters grew and changed from the situations they encountered, and their relationships with each other changed rather than circling around the same status quo like a newspaper strip from 1938 (or Lore Olympus). I wanted to watch Nari and her friends grow closer and become better people from knowing each other. Nari develops from an insecure and shy girl convinced she’s unworthy to be friends with her three best friends to a strong leader who won’t put up with any nonsense.

(A glow-up for the ages.)

Odd Girl Out isn’t even a romance webtoon for most of its run-- Nari’s love interest doesn’t get introduced until over 200 episodes in. But here’s the secret- there isn’t much difference between writing compelling romantic relationships and writing compelling friendships, because the appeal of both is the way the characters interact with each other and the world around them. (It’s why people ship characters that are close friends in the universe of the franchise- because they like seeing them interact.)

Odd Girl Out is very successful at developing a wide variety of relationships over the course of its run- between classmates, between relatives, between friends and teammates working together on different projects, so when Morangji tries their hand at romance, it ends up working very well.

When Seungha first shows up, Nari finds him attractive, but they’re immediately at odds. (You see this a lot in romcoms, and that’s because initial dislike creates narrative tension and means there’s more room for growth and development in the relationship as they get over their differences and build comraderie instead. It works really well in Odd Girl Out because the source of their conflict is funny and the eventual resolution is hilarious. Please read it.)

Seungha’s class is directly above Nari’s, and they get in a fight about their respective classes making too much noise. Both are the presidents of their classes, both are smart and stubborn, and Nari captures Seungha’s attention by winning their battle.

They end up working together on a student council committee, and after spending a lot of time together, helping each other through problems and flirting by leaving each other snacks, they finally go on a date and it’s very cute. 

But what makes it so cute, and what makes their eventual romance so rewarding to readers, is the buildup. It’s clearly shown that Seungha and Nari like and respect each other, have a lot in common, and enjoy spending time together. We see them having a good time in each other’s company often enough to believe that a relationship between them might be cute. The author is also careful to use visual shorthand like blushing and longing stares to establish that there is an element of attraction there as well.

Not all romance has to develop from friends to lovers- a non-comics relationship I recently loved reading was in Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince trilogy, where the protagonist and her enemy are lovers while still hating each other. But all romance must develop from attraction. The readers need to believe the couple is attracted to each other. The same goes for friendships: the reader needs to believe that the characters enjoy spending time together, unless it’s an unhealthy friendship dynamic on purpose, which Odd Girl Out also explores and resolves over the course of the story.

To make a relationship believable in fiction, you have to show the readers how it works- whether they’re just getting to know each other now or have been married for fifteen years. Why are these people together? How will they change over the course of the story?

Exercise: Honestly, writing romance is highly dependent on people’s personal preferences for fictional relationships. So, think of your favorite fictional couple (or friendship, or rivalry), and write a paragraph about how they work. How does character A feel about character B, and vice versa? What do they do when they accidentally end up in the same space, and what do they do when they hang out on purpose? Write a fanfic if you’re feeling particularly inspired.

Webtoon rec of the day: Please read Odd Girl Out! 

Seed is a science-fiction comic about a possibly-evil AI who manipulates a middle schooler into giving it access to her family’s tech connections. This is a comic that feels primed for a Netflix adaptation: there’s a lot of “talking head” panels of just two people having a tense, dramatic conversation, and not much direct action or things that really need to be portrayed visually. 

To make its talking head sequences more interesting, the artist breaks the panel borders with representations of the characters from their chest up. This sticks out because it is an unusual way to represent two characters in conversation, but it’s also jarringly unnatural.

The artist also heavily favors placing the character in focus on the left side of the panel, which leads to long dialogue sequences looking confusing and repetitive.

(Also, every single scene is happening during sunset for some reason? Is this secretly a Michael Bay film? Anyway.)

There are ways to make extended dialogue sequences interesting and dynamic without having to draw a lot of new art for every panel, but this is not one of them.

Most comics, especially story-driven and character-driven comics, will end up with a lot of dialogue. Dialogue develops characters, moves the plot forward, and can be a vehicle for humor and exposition as well. Which is why it’s so important to present that dialogue in an interesting, appealing way.

Exercise: One simple trick to help make a “talking head” scene more interesting (which can also be applied to prose!) is to give your characters something to do with their hands or bodies while they talk. They could be walking to school, eating dinner, playing a game together, anything except sitting stoically around a table. 

So, for today’s exercise, write a short dialogue between 2 characters who are trying to decide what to do for dinner today. (Any two characters you feel comfortable writing.) Now, try breaking it up into no less than 6 comic panels. It doesn’t have to look good, this is just an exercise! Stick figures allowed!

In those 6 panels, try to a) establish the location of the scene, b) zoom in and out of the scene so there are both close-up and wider shots of the characters, c) have the characters do something besides just sitting and talking, and d) think about how to break up the dialogue between panels- do you need a beat panel anywhere? Should you break up a line across multiple panels? e) cutting away from the character’s faces for a panel and focusing on their hands or the enviroment instead and see how that changes the tone of the dialogue.

Webtoon Rec of the Day: Any slice of life comic worth its salt has the talking head scene mastered, and one of my favorites at the moment is Romance 101. It’s a fluffy college-setting slow burn with an overachieving nerdy protagonist. The characters spend a lot of time talking to each other, but their conversations are never boring to look at because they’re always staged in different ways that progress the story.

Let’s Play is a comic about a shy nerdy audience surrogate girl named Sam and her three identically hot and ripped male love interests competing for her attention. Sometimes video games are mentioned.

Early in Let’s Play’s run, the author does a Q and A episode, like many Webtoons do, and answers a question like this:

“There is an LGBT character, but I don’t want for them to be labeled “the gay” character, so it’s not come up yet. There is more to the character’s personality than their sexuality.”

Since this Q and A ran, there have been no confirmed LGBT characters in the Let’s Play Webtoon. To make sure I didn’t miss anything here, I googled and found that the author confirmed a minor character is gay on Twitter and in a promotional animated short. 

That doesn’t even look like a rainbow flag, but I digress!

Let’s Play is full of heterosexual characters expressing their heterosexuality over and over again, having relationships, having sex, sexually fantasizing about their heterosexual objects of affection in lovingly rendered detail, but Dee (the only confirmed extracanonically non-heterosexual character in this comic) is not afforded anywhere near that level of sexuality. Dee exists to be sweet and helpful, not to have an arc or development of her own.

(Here is an example of our heterosexual protagonist having a heterosexual BDSM fantasy rendered in detail. It should be noted there was no warning or indication that the episode this was in was not appropriate for all readers. Click at your own risk.)

Perhaps Mongie is afraid of writing a character different from herself incorrectly. Perhaps she knows her audience is primarily interested in Sam’s romantic entanglements and not much else and is focusing her energy on what her readers want. Regardless, the complete lack of representation makes reading this comic alienating and uncomfortable for readers who are not strictly heterosexual. 

This isn’t the only area in which Mongie’s attempts at diversity fall flat (Dean San Martin’s introduction, for example, is... well.)

Can you guess how many Latino characters are in Let’s Play? Correct!

Stereotypes flatten characterization by replacing what could be an interesting original character with a generic image of that group that everyone’s heard of. Creating a story in which every character with depth, nuance and screentime is white, straight, cisgender,  able-bodied, middle to upper class, and heterosexual, reinforces the view that those are the only types of stories and characters worth paying attention to.

If you’re interested in portraying a group you’re not part of respectfully, sensitivity readers are an invaluable resource and worth looking into. In general, listening to people who aren’t like you and reading and watching media made by people who aren’t like you is a good way to broaden your horizons both creatively and as a person.

Exercise: Line up all the characters you’ve ever created (or at least all the characters in your current project.) What makes each of them different from each other? What do they have in common? How does their personal background inform their personality? Is this your only character who has this specific trait, and do they have other attributes besides having this one specific trait?

Check out @writingwithcolor​ for more resources on writing diverse characters without reinforcing tired stereotypes.

Webtoon Rec of the Day: I’ve already mentioned Gourmet Hound like three times but I will mention it again because I love it and Gourmet Hound does portray people of different gender identities, sexualities, races and ethnicities with respect and care, without resorting to stereotypes.

1. In Episode 4 of The Wendybird, the put-upon sheltered upper-class English girl with a rebellious streak wants to experience the thrill of a magical pirate battle as soon as she arrives to the Neverland. Peter Pan, the leader of the Lost Boys, tells her that she has to be more methodical and careful and they need to show her to her new home.

2. As they arrive to the den of Lost Boys, they end up meeting a much more hostile welcome than expected - jealous Tink told the boys that the ugly and stupid Wendybird will fly by and that she needs to be shot. Wendy, though shocked, has enough sense and grace to see that a stray arrow is about to hit her little sister, and she jumps to take the hit, receiving a dangerous wound but saving her family member.

3. In the Episode 5, Wendy is feeling sad, because for all her talk, she ended up getting hurt and having to rely on others for help. No one mentions her saving the little sister; not even her. Then after having a little talk with Tootles, she resolves to stop overthinking her every action and act more carelessly, like her hero Peter Pan.

If you read through all that and already bursting with questions like "did I miss something? Did you leave out some important scenes or context?" congratulations, you passed the class! If not, well, let me explain.

The scenes have contradicting themes and points they want to make. Wendy being careless is what endangered her family, but the next scene pretends that the problem is that she's not careless enough. This affects every single character since all of them more or less work in service of Wendy's, all providing either an obstacle, a foil or a guiding hand, that she later reflects on and seemingly builds her character as a reaction to the challenge provided by the other characters. This is a great idea for a coming-of-age story and it is exactly how the book was written (it is in fact a moment of genius; the book is all about Wendy experiencing the invasion of the adulthood in her world of childhood in a safe, controlled environment of imagination and play). The lesson here is NOT "having themes and characters be solely in service of the main character is bad". It's the fact that the careless execution renders the entire story a jumbled mess rather than a unified narrative; notice how the role of Peter Pan shifts from scene to scene. In the first scene described here, Peter Pan has a role of an antagonist pushing back against Wendy's desire for adventure ("antagonist" here being "force that opposes the protagonist"). He is caring, guiding, firm, but also reminds Wendy of gentle oppression of her own father. In the third scene, Peter Pan is now the guide, the inspiration, the moving force in Wendy's resolve to be more daring, less caring, more rah-rah girl power; his role as an antagonist is brushed away as if the scene never existed.

And that's exactly the core problem that lies with this kind of writing fumble is the fact that the author seemingly doesn't believe the scene exists pasts the point of it transitioning to another scene. Every scene seems to have a certain point, a theme, an emotion it relays, but every time its mentioned again it is assigned a completely different point, a theme, and emotion.

Wendy is being brave and selfless and she's taking an arrow aimed at her family, end scene.

Wendy is being sad for being a weak damsel in distress, end scene.

Wendy is being gung-ho, excited and reckless and Peter Pan is talking her out of her tomboyish ways, end scene.

Wendy is sad she's too weak and uncool to hang out with the Neverland gang and resolves to be more careless and brave, like Peter Pan, end scene.

The story seems like a patchwork of events rather than being a single flowing narrative, and the scenes hit reset as soon as their purpose is done; this creates the illusion of actual themes and story happening without actually earning any kind of catharsis. Some people are more event-minded; looking back at the story, they'll judge it for the emotions the single events evoked in them (this scene with X was incredible! That scene with Y had them look really cool!) And the rest of the story is just here to move the characters from event to event with no real connection between them.

But the result of this patchwork writing is that there is no actual consequences, no weight to the story. The characters learn nothing, they don't grow, and you're just stuck experiencing surface level emotions that go nowhere.