Let’s look at some webcomics ideas that are based around human functionality.
You may have noticed that many webcomics, particularly gag strips, use a horizontal format. And the most logical response to that is because most computer screens are horizontal. Makes sense, right? But why do you suppose monitors are horizontal?The answer actually stems from human factors engineering.
Your eyeball is, for all practical purposes, a sphere. It’s pretty much the same size in every direction. The portion of your eye that lets in light and allows you to see is the iris, that black circle in the middle of your eye. Your iris is pretty much the same size in every direction. That means that what you see out of one eye is symmetrical—you can see the same distance in every direction. Think of the old trope from film and television where someone looks through a telescope and the director crops the image to a small circle; although that’s a crude approximation, that’s how you see with one eye.
But most of us have two eyes, side by side. If you place two of those circles of vision next to one another, you get more of an oval shape. A horizontal oval. As humans, we naturally see everything in a landscape format, so it makes sense to create screens of information that maximize on that.
Sometimes, though, a single screen of comics isn’t enough and we need to scroll to see the rest of it. And most frequently, that scroll is vertical. Why? Because most people don’t like to scroll horizontally, so browsers and web pages are generally designed to roll additional information down the page, and not across. That might seem counter-intuitive given the horizontal vision piece I just explained. But in this case, the function is based off another part of the human body.
Watch yourself the next time you flick through a series of photos on your phone. Generally, you’ll put your finger on the screen and swipe to the left or right, using your whole hand pivoting off your wrist. Compare that to when you’re reading a long text message or web page that requires moving up and down. You can manipulate the screen to scroll with a single finger, barely moving the rest of your hand at all.
Your fingers have very limited mobility from side to side, only a slight amount at the knuckle. But your interphalangeal joints (the ones in between the different sections of your fingers) allow for a great deal of back and forth movement, letting you to curl your fingertip back into your palm. Therefore an up/down swipe is a much more natural and fluid motion for your fingers, while a left/right swipe almost inherently requires your entire hand, even if you wind up turning it slightly sideways.
Some creators have experimented with side-scrolling comics, but they frequently don’t work well because that goes against how the human body itself works. And while you do see a number of webcomics that are more vertically than horizontally oriented (generally done to cater to later printing formats), you will frequently hear reviewers and critics note a tinge of dissatisfaction with a comment about it probably being better suited for print. Creators are, of course, welcome to continue experiments, but they should go into them knowing they’re working against millennia of human evolution!