How the Infinite Scroll Changed the Way Comics Tell Stories
For about a century, comics lived on paper. A cartoonist drew a page, a reader took in that page, and then the reader turned it. That rhythm was so familiar that most of us stopped noticing it existed. Then comics moved onto the phone, the page quietly vanished, and vertical scrolling took its place. Suddenly the story didn’t arrive in spreads anymore. It arrived one thumb-flick at a time.
At first glance, a webtoon looks like a regular comic that has been unstacked and laid end to end. However, the more closely you look, the stranger the change becomes. When comics moved onto the phone, the reader’s thumb became part of the storytelling. Researchers and the platforms themselves are now documenting what that shift actually does to the way we read.
So let’s treat it like an experiment and run it through a few hypotheses.
Hypothesis 01
The Page Was Doing More Than We Thought
A printed comics page is a remarkably sophisticated machine. Before you read a single word balloon, you have already glimpsed the whole page at once, including its big splash panel, its tiny reaction shots and the general shape of what’s coming. The cartoonist designs that entire composition to steer your eye, and it mostly works.
Eye-tracking research backs this up. In a study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Clare Kirtley and her colleagues tracked readers’ eyes across six different page layouts. They found that the outlines of the panels themselves do most of the work of telling readers where to go next, while text placement nudges the route in certain layouts. In other words, the page’s architecture is a set of directions.
Experience matters, too. A 2024 study in the Journal of Eye Movement Research compared expert comics readers with novices and found that the experts lingered on the images, while the newcomers spent longer on the text. Seasoned readers, in other words, have learned to read the pictures.
Meanwhile, the page hides one of the oldest tricks in comics. Scott McCloud famously described the gutter, the blank strip between panels, as the place where readers perform “closure,” mentally supplying whatever happened between two drawings. The page turn is that same gap made physical, because the cartoonist can plant a question on the right-hand page and hold the answer until you flip it.
Then the phone came along and took the page away.
The infinite canvas segment starts around 13:34.
Hypothesis 02
The Screen Became a Keyhole
Back in 2000, years before the iPhone, McCloud predicted part of this in his book Reinventing Comics. He called the idea the infinite canvas, which he described as “treating the screen as a window rather than a page.” Vertical scrolling turned that window into something closer to a keyhole. You no longer see the whole composition. Instead, you see one slice of a canvas that may be dozens of screens tall, and the rest stays hidden above and below the glass.
That changes what readers pay attention to. For example, researchers publishing in Scientific Reports showed comics to 18 readers one panel at a time and collected more than 99,000 viewing times across seven volumes. The time people spent on each panel tracked closely with how much text was in its balloons. The images themselves, it seems, get absorbed very quickly once a reader isn’t scanning an entire page.
A 2026 study from National Taipei University of Technology, published in SAGE Open, tested three reading interfaces on 24 readers: a full page, a single-frame scrolling view and a guided view that walks the reader from panel to panel. The single-frame format made complex stories easier to follow, but readers found it less satisfying to look at. Guided viewing also helped readers with less comics experience recall more of the story and feel more engaged with it. Meanwhile, most of the fluent readers still preferred the full page.
The keyhole makes the story easier to follow. It also takes away the view of the whole page.
Hypothesis 03
Empty Space Became Time
This is where vertical scrolling gets genuinely new. On paper, the gutter between two panels is usually a thin, uniform strip. In a webtoon, however, the creator can make that gap as long as they like, and the reader has to physically travel through it.
Francesca Benatti’s Cambridge University Press study Innovations in Digital Comics spells out the mechanism. Because wider space between panels requires more scrolling before the next image appears, creators can use that distance to “express the duration of time.” The empty space isn’t padding. It’s a clock.
An essay in The Comics Journal goes further. In webtoons, it argues, the gutter stops being a mere break and starts narrating. A long stretch of gutter can imply that a great deal of time has passed or that the scene has changed. The gutter’s color can set a mood, with soft pastels for romance or darkness and rain for dread. Creators even move captions and dialogue out of the panels and into the gutter itself.
In print, the gutter separates moments. In a webtoon, the gutter becomes time.
Here’s what that feels like. Keep scrolling.
Still here? That pause you just scrolled through was the story.
Nothing was drawn in that space, and yet it took you a moment to cross it. That moment is exactly what a webtoon creator gets to design.
Hypothesis 04
Vertical Scrolling Replaced the Page Turn
Print cartoonists have always had one great weapon for suspense, and it’s the page turn. Put the setup on the right-hand page, hide the payoff on the next one, and the reader’s own hand delivers the surprise. On a phone, that physical mechanism disappears. Suspense doesn’t, though. It just moves somewhere else.
In a webtoon, the creator controls whatever sits below the bottom edge of the screen. As a result, the reader has to physically reveal the next moment. The setup appears, the thumb scrolls, a stretch of empty space goes by, the thumb keeps scrolling, and only then does the reveal slide into view.
The Comics Journal essay offers a chilling example from a Korean horror webtoon. In the printed version, a reader can glimpse a character’s dead daughter entering in the next panels, because they sit right there on the open page. In the webtoon, by contrast, the reader must scroll down to discover what the character is staring at. By controlling the order in which panels appear, the scrolling format builds tension that the printed page gives away. That’s why horror and suspense have thrived in the format.
The reader isn’t merely watching the timing, either. They’re performing it.
Field Notes
The Readers Have Already Voted
Vertical scrolling isn’t a niche experiment. In its second-quarter 2026 results, WEBTOON Entertainment reported approximately 155 million monthly active users and $338.5 million in quarterly revenue, $263.9 million of it from paid content. Those numbers don’t prove that scrolling caused the audience. Still, they show that a storytelling format built around the thumb now supports a very large entertainment business.
On September 21, 2026, WEBTOON and National Research Group released Inside Webcomic Fandom, a survey of more than 500 U.S. readers ages 13 to 49 who read webcomics at least monthly, along with interviews with creators. Because WEBTOON commissioned it, it’s best read as industry research rather than independent science. Even so, a few results stand out. Ninety percent of those readers said they often choose webcomics over other entertainment, and half said they browse social media less while reading them. In other words, one kind of scrolling is competing with another.
90%: the share of surveyed webcomic readers who say they often choose webcomics over other entertainment.
The platforms are nudging creators in the same direction. Tapas, for example, tells artists in its featuring guidelines that “vertical-scroll comics can easily be read on both the website and mobile devices,” and it favors mobile-friendly series for features.
Hypothesis 05
The Reader Runs the Projector
Vertical scrolling often makes comics behave more like film than like print. A tall establishing image can unfold as the reader travels down it, much like a camera tilting across a skyline. Meanwhile, a string of tight panels can speed things up the way quick cuts do in an edit. Creators talk about shots, beats and reveals as much as they talk about pages.
Unlike film, however, nobody else is running the projector. The reader decides how fast the story moves, when it pauses and whether to scroll back up for another look. The creator can only shape the road with distance, size and placement, and then hand the steering wheel to the audience.
That trade-off shows up in the research. The artists interviewed for the Taipei study said guided and scrolling formats give them “clarity and pacing control,” but they also worried about losing their carefully designed page compositions. Every format gives something and takes something. Vertical scrolling gives up the grand view of the page, and in exchange it gets precise control over the order and timing of every reveal.
Findings
The Reader Became Part of the Edit
It would be easy to sum all of this up by saying that phones made comics vertical. That’s true, but it misses the more interesting point. The printed page gave cartoonists control over space, meaning what sits beside what and what the eye catches first. Vertical scrolling gave them control over something a page never could, which is distance.
A webtoon creator decides how far your thumb has to travel before you see what happens next. That distance becomes silence, suspense, the passage of time or a punchline held just out of view. Because the reader physically covers that distance, they become part of the storytelling system, a sort of editor who can only cut where the creator lets them.
Comics didn’t lose the page turn. Instead, they stretched it out and put it under your thumb.
The next time you’re lost in a webtoon at 1 a.m., notice the moment your thumb hesitates just before a reveal. That hesitation isn’t an accident. Someone drew the empty space that caused it.
Run the Experiment Yourself
Open any webtoon you love and find a big dramatic moment. Then read it twice, first at your normal speed and then with a screen recording running. When you play the recording back, watch where your thumb slows down and where it stops completely. Next, count how many screens of empty space came before the reveal.
That’s your data.