The webtoon is read by scrolling down the screen. It is a comic without pages, and the concept of dispensing with them was defended by Scott McCloud, according to his own account, in a 1995 lecture. This text gathers what three sources say about what changes when moving from paper to scroll, and highlights what is not documented.
The screen as a window: McCloud's infinite canvas
Scott McCloud maintains on his website, in a page signed in February 2009, that the infinite canvas is a set of design strategies based on treating the screen as a window rather than a page. There is no reason, he states, for long-form comics to be divided into pages when moving to the internet, and the advantages of "putting all panels together on a single “canvas”" are significant.
He recounts that the first reference to the term he finds in his archives is a lecture at Ohio State University in 1995, when he was preparing a CD-ROM proposal for Understanding Comics. He launched his website in 1998, and the term spread with Reinventing Comics in 2000.
He presents six arguments. Pacing: on paper, page size and page count dictate the duration of a sequence, whereas on a canvas, one may add or remove beats until it functions. Dynamic range: each panel limits the size and shape of the next. The distance between panels as time: in a century of printed comics, this has rarely been exploited, so as not to waste paper. Flow: page breaks impose a rhythm extraneous to the narrative. The Z-axis, as a resource for narrative layers. And the identity of the comic as an art form.
McCloud acknowledges the criticisms: that it is a gimmick, that browsers are not designed for it, and that, in his view at the time, these formats were poorly suited to the reading habits of the majority. He clarifies that his proposal was for long-form comics, not strips. His page does not mention the webtoon.
The webtoon: vertical reading
According to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a webtoon is a digital comic originating in South Korea that is read vertically, by scrolling on a computer or mobile screen. Each episode is read in less than five minutes. The museum traces its origin to daily online chronicles created by unemployed individuals during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and notes that in 2020, combined sales exceeded one trillion won for the first time.
In my view, vertical reading eliminates a significant portion of the page breaks that McCloud criticised, albeit with one difference: McCloud imagined a canvas that could be traversed in two dimensions, whereas scrolling offers only a single direction. Neither source establishes a link between them, and nothing I have read proves that McCloud influenced the webtoon.
Format changes, according to a critic
Matt Ledger, in his blog Matt Reads Comics (28 April 2026), describes his readings of webtoon adaptations to print. It is the opinion of a reader and not a study.
- He finds them inconsistent. In Your Letter, by Hyeon A Cho, the first twenty pages or so strike him as "obviously adapted": overlapping panels and an uneven rhythm; the remainder of the book functions well. The Lore Olympus books strike him as well-adapted.
- In the reverse direction, two Marvel comics adapted to WEBTOON and reformatted by MAKMA, Astonishing X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man, strike him as unreadable: isolated panels with nothing to encourage further scrolling, and landscape panels rotated sideways. Daredevil and Avengers, reformatted by Kisai Entertainment, function for him, with varied panel placement and text that provides momentum.
- He concludes that each format possesses its own rhythm and that adapting from one to the other requires more than merely joining or separating panels.
Undocumented data
- I have not located a primary statement from an author or publisher regarding how a webcomic is reformatted for print, following three searches. The official website for Lore Olympus confirms that the printed volumes collect episodes of the webcomic, but it does not explain how they were reformatted. There are Spanish cases, such as El Vosque, which are likewise undocumented.
- The source regarding reformatting is an individual opinion.
- McCloud's page is over fifteen years old: his assertions regarding hardware and reading habits describe 2009.
- The Tebeosfera report that tracks the Spanish printed comic market excludes webtoons and e-books. There are no figures for screen-based reading in this text.
Implications for the creator
In my view, the practical lesson is to decide on the format before drawing. A page conceived for print and a page conceived for scrolling are resolved through distinct decisions regarding rhythm and space, and converting one into the other is laborious. To organise the terms, consult Manga, manhwa, webtoon and comic: what each word means. To publish on screen, How to publish a webcomic without relying on a platform. And for print, Preparing a comic page for printing.
An open conversation
This text distinguishes between verified figures, inconsistent figures, and interpretation. If you work in publishing, bookselling, libraries, or reading research and can clarify any data, you may write to me.
The author's relationship to the cases
There is no financial, professional, or collection-based relationship with Scott McCloud, the Victoria and Albert Museum, WEBTOON, or Matt Reads Comics.