Hey Look At This Comic: Fullmetal Alchemist (The Webtoons Port)
Hey did you know they put Fullmetal Alchemist, Hiromu Arakawa's downright genre defining manga about two brothers searching for the Philosophers' Stone, on the infinite scroll webcomics platform Webtoons?
Ok, ok, not an auspicious start I admit, but let me try to be nice here for a bit. In the manga of Fullmetal Alchemist, and its 2003 anime adaptation, the story begins the same way: with a catastrophically failed experiment that forever changes the lives and bodies of Edward and Alphonse Elric. The manga simply presents this in one page, ending in a shocking panel of Edward, a young boy with one leg missing, ripped off:
Arakawa uses this page to hint at the later narrative and introduce the story's core motif: "Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving up something in return." The '03 adaptation opts to extend this sequence, giving us a sense of the show's dark, horror-inflected reinterpretation of the story. (The later anime Brotherhood, a reinterpretation of both these versions, opens completely differently with an original story.) We have a source and a series of adaptational choices.
I would describe the Webtoons version more as a port than an adaptation. It's the manga again, but with pages recut to fit Webtoons' phone-focused, infinite scroll format. The comic is arranged so that one panel with its speech bubbles are on screen at any given moment, and you read continuously through the whole chapter panel by panel. Panels are digitally colored or recolored and occasionally edited to accommodate alternate speech bubble placement, but otherwise it is the comic, cut up.
They put their own spin on this iconic opening, though, with some interesting results. I'm gonna swallow some quibbles with the digital recoloring and the insertion of superfluous DU-DUN epic sound effects to acknowledge: they're taking advantage of the format! (Here's the link again so you can see for yourself, since it's impractical to reproduce here.) Arakawa's original layout succinctly introduced the protagonists' mysterious dark backstory, giving us just a teaser for later. Here the scrolling format creates a reading pause between the initial line about learning and pain, and the first actual panel. In that interim, enforced by the fact that we can't just "skip ahead", we have to physically scroll through this page space, the white background darkens and fills with crackling sound effects. It effectively builds apprehension in a way the original, as a whole visual unit, cannot, and creates a sense that we, like Ed, are fading into awareness of a catastrophe.
Because in terms of the actual comics form, popular webtoons often feel almost, well, illiterate.
Or at least pretty uninterested in taking advantage of the structural affordances of both comics generally and this scrolling format in particular, the way the opening of the FMA port does. A huge structural aspect of comics is the breakdown of a page's metaframe into smaller frames, which the reader takes in as a whole, and might scan back and forth across. An infinite canvas hypercomic, which Scott McCloud memorably describes as not a page but a window or viewport, navigates gridding a bit differently, since panels slide into view, creating different compositions as we pass over them. That opens up some pretty interesting possibility space, though, like the way that the FMA port creates this sense of rising dread and cascading consequences. The fact that the word bubbles and sfx/vfx are packed pretty close together enhances this, I think, not giving us or Ed breathing room.
This is not the norm, even within this port. Instead, panels have primarily been given considerable space on the top and bottom, in what I think of as the Webtoons house style: one panel-sized unit of story information is permitted on the (assumed) phone screen at a time. This results in some very weird pacing experiences, the necessary mechanical operation of scrolling creating a kind of powerpoint or slideshow effect. This sometimes enhances long panels, creating a "reveal" effect, and it's given me valuable new perspective on how I think Arakawa wants her panels navigated... but take this page, which introduces our main characters in the town of Leore:
The page before it establishes the town setting, but not this specific set, an open air food stand. And instead of opening the page with an establishing shot that would give us the whole layout, Arakawa leads with the brothers themselves, in close up, hitting us with their strangeness before pulling back for the "are you guys street performers?" punchline. Except, that's not quite true. Unlike in a webtoon, the page presents all these panels at once, providing an opportunity to infer the environment and how these characters interact that gets clarified through reading.
I found reading this bit in webtoon form, on the other hand, jarring and a bit disorienting. If this is a map of space and time, as McCloud imagines, us peering into it via a window, the window we're given is more like a peephole! It asks for a lot of reconstruction after the fact. It's possible that if you're used to the Webtoons house style this feels less jarring, but I do feel like this is a meaningful change from how the comic conveys information... despite the fact that it's all the same panels. And it doesn't really feel like there's been much thought put into what the new experience is and how this format affects it.
Here's a more significant example of this. Observe this manga page:
Ed's drawn in an apparent close focus here, his extremities looming towards the reader, with Al's face in shadow on the side, downcast, dominated compositionally by his brother and the related story of Anime Icarus. A wide gutter slices Ed's head from his body here. Why? Thierry Groensteen says one function of the frame is to signal to the audience that there is something to be read here. What the reader does not know at this point--though might guess, given the opening page--is that the arm and leg most prominent in this frame are both artificial "automail": the disastrous experiment that opens the chapter cost Ed a literal arm and a leg. This carries through into the panel of Alponse, who has, in fact, lost his entire body, and exists only as a soul bonded to a suit of armor. We enter and leave the page probably much like Rose does: shocked at Ed's arrogance, then confused by the story. Only later will we understand the significance of Arakawa taking a continuous composition of Ed and cutting through it.
Here's how this looks on Webtoon:
LOOK HOW THEY MASSACRED MY BOY
Yeah this is a bit of a howler. What makes the original composition read as significant is precisely the tension between continuity and schism. This just sorta flings the two halves of Ed into separate corners of the room. Get recut, pipsqueak! I don't think this has to be the case--nothing's forcing them to separate these two panels so much, other than it being the default house style to parcel out the story one feed pellet at a time. This could easily be fixed, and yet, it isn't, because as I said this exists not to adapt the story, taking the kind of bold liberties both Fullmetal Alchemist animes do, but to port the story to a potentially new, lucrative user base.
These... what would we call them, anti-techniques? These anti-techniques pop up all over as I look through "Trending Webtoons". Panel shapes and sizes that don't seem to have semantic function, wide gaps between panels, a bare minimum approach to cartooning that often feels like it just serves to illustrate dialogue... The main place where a given webtoon feels meaningfully itself is with the layers of effects and patterns and motifs in the background, but at a glance I can't say I think they're often used to signify something other than the fact that the cartoonist (or production house) can put in the work to fill what would otherwise be blank space. Being original works for the most part, there's nothing quite as egregious as the decapitated Edward (not true of the Marvel ports on the website which are also Quite Bad), but I think that case highlights how much is lost in this single panel house style.
Moreover, I don't think the typical webtoon has the latitude to explore infinite canvas specific techniques like these continuous backgrounds. They can't become really meaningful elements, when the panels are still being designed for an eventual print release. I could be wrong, but that's my impression, and it's easy to find lots of advice online about laying out a print comic, then doing a kind of pan and scan operation for the Webtoons or Tapas version--often resulting in big blank spaces to accommodate vertical rather than formerly horizontal speech bubbles. Tale as old as Telenet, I guess, the web artist's quest for legitimacy and a way to actually get paid. Webtoons the corporation maybe offered more honesty than they meant to when they infamously described their own product as "literature's fun side-hustle." The Webtoons model seems designed to result in awkward hybrids, not able to take advantage of the infinite canvas form with techniques that can't translate to print, not able to grid out a traditional print comics technique that will discombobulate in the Webtoons house style. In that sense, I do think this discourages comics literacy, on the part of readers and creators.
All of which I suppose will be irrelevant when you can just get a Webtoons AI powered chatbot of the character to explain the story for you, so you don't have to engage with visual storytelling at all. Whatever, I'm going to go practice drawing.
POSTSCRIPT: I did actually get some interesting recs out of this for some comics that utilize the format well, so I may follow up on this further in the future...
