Responsiveness

• asequentialart.com
• The Nib used basic responsiveness
• https://mastodon.social/@nickcolley@toot.cat/110955754857788724
• Not Guided View or its workalikes — that’s a retrofit and you know it
• Zooming & panning are a last resort, but at least they exist.
• prior art with newspaper comic layouts; Oddly enough, responsiveness is not a new problem for comics. Now, rebelling against this forced layout is part of Bill Watterson’s fame, but even Bill might be okay with responsive comics if he could control how he did it, instead of the preplanned panels that newspapers set.
• https://twitter.com/maxkriegers/status/1295952957847089152
• prior art for simple responsiveness: XKCD, Dinosaur Comics
• What to do with giant splash panels? (Like, say, Kill 6 Billion Demons has)
  • Zoom & pan with a Google Maps-like interface?
  • A series of predetermined close-ups?
  • Animated scrolling over the panel at a higher zoom-level?
• “Infinite pages”
  • Kid Radd
  • Check, Please!
  • Honey Crab
  • About Digital Comics by balak01 — which apparently is more widely known as “turbomedia”, at least within French comics?
    • Webcomics in France § Turbomedia · Wikipedia
    • Balak, auteur et créateur du Turbo Media : “Il y a un marché de la BD numérique”
• Note that the “break panels into separate <img>s and let them flow like the inline-blocks they are” approach is basically the only one that could possibly work in places where you can’t rely on your CSS being respected:
  • RSS readers
  • Browsers’ Reading Mode
  • Your own site if you’re not comfortable with CSS
  • Email to some extent (if the tool you use to make the emails haven’t screwed up their CSS, anyway; Substack succumbed to Tailwind brainrot so you can’t use it there)
• https://w3.eleqtriq.com/2014/02/everything-is-relative-the-art-of-the-adaptive-image/

All that stuff with CSS-IRL, except by now I'm fairly certain you cannot have speech balloons expand horizontally, unless they're single-line only. (Which might be okay for things like SFX or short utterances, but forcing longer text to not wrap would be counterintuitive for responsiveness. Then again, I think it’s possible to make it expand in horizontal direction(s), then as soon as it starts line-wrapping you gotta choose if it expands upwards or downwards.)

Scrolly panels

Not really responsive like how most think, but they’re certainly mobile-first. (On larger screens, they can be kind of annoying with how much space is wasted — like most WEBTOON stuff)

Kate Beaton was doing scrolly panels before it was cool, and her comics are the funniest, so there must be something to it. (That one’s technically not even responsive! But it could be with a <meta name="viewport">)

I suppose Neglected Mario Characters did this too. I vividly remember each panel loading two-at-a-time more slowly than I read, so I would frequently wait by spinning in the computer chair to give it time to get ahead of me. (2-at-a-time is because of the accepted TCP per-host connection limit at the time.)

New/upcoming CSS that makes responsiveness easier

• text-wrap: balance
• Subgrid
• Element queries
• shape-inside (hopefully)
• Anchor positioning, maybe?
  • Roman Komarov’s Anchor Positioning experiments
  • I’m mostly hoping for auto-pointing speech balloon tails, similar to @jhey’s trick for tethering an element to multiple anchors
• Oh man this could be perfect for speech balloons: https://kizu.dev/position-driven-styles/