Today I'm thinking about American illustrator James Bingham and how @LINEWebtoon artists in particular might benefit from examining his compositions. His staging is energetic and his drapery is *chef's kiss*, but what it really comes down to is his use of vertical space. Thread: 
The main limitation of the Webtoon format is the fixed horizontal space. Webtoons can scroll forever, but they're only ever as wide as your phone. I learned early on that landscape shots blip by in this format, because they're only ever as wide as, say, a panel from Watchmen.
But this is also part of what makes the format so great -- endless vertical space makes for tall, vertiginous panning shots whenever you want, an experience that's genuinely more "cinematic" than a print comic, because you're only ever looking at one thing at a time --
-- while still letting the reader to control the pace, since they're are totally in charge of how fast or slow the comic reads. The immediacy of cinema, the personalized experience of a comic. It's awesome. But again, the width is still a restriction. Which brings us back to...
...Bingham's amazing use of vertical space. For instance: talking around a table is inherently horizontal, so how do you make it work in portrait mode? Like so. Note how making the lower left guy stand keeps the table from taking up too much space between the upper and lower men.
Bingham is great at using depth to save space by layering elements of a scene on top of each other. Look at how the boxer's face, the KO'd other guy, and the reporter's face all share the same slim strip of the image -- and imagine how much room that would leave for lettering?
He'll also sometimes batch things in the middle of the fame like this even when space isn't an issue. In the left one, it draws your focus to the conversation between the diver and the Captain. In the right, it creates isolation and intimacy. Both feel relaxed, uncrowded.
He also does a lot of shooting past elements of the setting, like the machinery in the left image or the... screen?... in the right. It lends the scene depth, and also establishes a geography between the characters and the setting. A much realer-feeling scene for not much effort.
And most importably for our purposes, it uses up very little horizontal space. A lot of these illustrations ran alongside prose stories in magazines, or on covers, where width was fixed and horizontal space was at a premium.
Using the FG elements to frame the scene not only saves space, but can also be used to divide characters, even squeeze one of them into a corner, as with the left image which I've used twice now because I'm really into it. And that lamp's just a big black shape, too. Easy peas.
(Yerp -- the right image, I mean. They got switched after I posted, for some reason.)
I've been trying to keep this in mind as I work on new episodes of my own Webtoon series, LAVENDER JACK -- for instance, layering the scene with a flight of stairs and a foregrounded main figure in this panel from last week's episode:
Or using a big figure to frame a very horizontal marching scene in this panel from next week's episode (don't tell @ladybb_re I showed you) :
I was initially hipped to Bingham's work, as well as so many other great illustrators, by comics jefe @steve_lieber. Here's a post about Bingham he made a few months ago, with more info about the artist himself:
And if you want to see me try to put this comics theory into comics action, you can check out my ongoing mystery/adventure Webtoon series LAVENDER JACK -- on the house, no less -- right here: webtoons.com/en/thriller/la…
