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Tower of God is the perfect modern media format

Manhwa is pretty much manga, but pronounced differently Korean. To be honest I haven't read a ton of it so I can't comment on it, but I will comment on the perfect modern media format: webtoons.

The God of High School

The God of High School is the middleground between manga and webtoons. It has, almost entirely, the paneling of manga and/or western comics. The Panels are Panels and each one has a black border. Every once in a while you'll get something broken out into the gutter. It reads like an adaptation of a manga into the webtoon format. But it gains a ton by doing that. Scrolling has replaced turning pages as books have replaced scrolls. This manwha can be consumed with the most minimal of effort.


Bongcheon-Dong Ghost - HORANG

What's the scariest comic you've ever read? Some lofi, heavy-black-ink-on-weathered-beige-paper indy zine? From Hell? Some existential growing old comic? No, you're wrong. It's this. I was terrified the first time I saw this. It was a magic trick. I was lead to believe that what I was ready was a comic, albeit with a vertical layout. The content itself is good and creepy, but the way it breaks expectations. This is truly the proto webtoon, as others have gone on to weave sound and animation into the manhwa. *

Tower of God

Tower of God is transcendent. The author, Slave. In. Utero, gets fucking wild in the gutters. Taking a read of Understanding Comics and you can identify how ToG uses gutters for all of the transition styles. However there's one pattern that gets strechted beyond the understanding: Subject-to-subject. It's a style of transition that calls attention to different details of a scene and traditionally it happens through a grouping of panels and gutters, but in ToG everything is a gutter.

There are so many things happening here. First as you are scrolling down, you see the first speech bubble without seeing who said it. And this works because you were just on the panel that added context a second ago. The next thing you see is the top of a characters head, floating in the gutter, and it's not just a head over a white background because as you continue scrolling you see the panel and its borders. But wait! One is missing. Not only does SIU live in the gutter, then don't believe in a separation between media and message. Finally, the remaining dialogue flows out into the gutter again.
This snippet of the comic has you "overhear" dialogue, focus on a character, see how that character exists in the space, and then "listen" to them speak as focus switches back. And this happens over time. Rather relying on laying out a single panel in a way to control a readers focus, SIU layouts out a timeline.
And the battle scenes. Imagine if there was a connection so as DBZ battles got more intense, the art improved and the cartoon started stretching out of the TV. As the battles in ToG progress, then turn from simple and tense, into equally tense splashes of colors and patterns.


Footnotes

* Personally this format doesn't do it for me for reasons I can't articulate. Maybe it's harder to orchestrate multiple pieces? It's probably because it makes two assumptions, that I'm watching the screen and have sound on. Neither of which may be true.

ToG looks fucking amazing on any of the curved screen devices. On a samsung s10 the comic wraps to the edge of the screen, small enough to hold but otherwise uncontainable. Those beveled edges lend a radiance and dimensionality to it.