Lecture 011

The comic "Quarantine" by Yang Ji takes advantage of Korean-style webcomic with long scrolling pages. Instead of pages, the single panels provide pauses in between each moment of the story. Furthermore, I noticed that the panels almost always switch between depicting the environment and the character. In another word, the panels depicting the character are always surrounded by two panels depicting the environment. Because of the limitation in screen sizes for most modern phones, readers can only see two panels within a page. Therefore it is essential to continuously provide both the setting and the character on the same phone screen. Switching between environment and characters can better contextualize the character in fiction.

On page 47, the author of "Quarantine" uses a long black panel with pure black. On the phone, the reader will have a moment of black screen when scrolling down. The black screen, with its unique reading experience, provides a transition between the "Inner World program" and the real world so that the reader can understand that the "Inner World" is actually a computer-generated virtual world for people to "quarantine" alone. Without such a black panel, the reader might be confused and failed to get the punch line of the story.

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