Waytale as Waytoon

Back in July 2022, Hugues invited me to do some research and development to update literary walking guides. We were working on a project for Winchester and Emerald. I re-visited the ramble-strip design I had made for iPhone screens back in October 2014; I found it again on ResearchGate. By early August, I had a draft design, which makes a nod to the style of webtoons, with their gap between frames. My essential ramblestrip is still at the heart of the vertical scrolling pdf and ebook versions, though.

Of course, I wanted to retain what I had learnt about narrative knowing, so you will see I have kept an I-narrator, and those all-important, past tenses to recount the walk across town. The comics sensibility, with its call-out speech bubbles, lets me add a second gloss to the voice of the narrator. The narrator’s cartoon memoji can hail the reader direct from the Waytale as it unscrolls down the phone screen.

The webtoon wave has found its home in South Korea, where webtoon comics have 6 million reads everyday. In France, the home of printed comics, French TV financed a start-up called Delitoon in 2016, and they now have 400 000 subscribers to their webtoon releases. The first one from Travel Writers Online was launched in the Google Play Book Store on 10 August 2022, with a literary walk across Exeter that connects the 2 smaller railway stations. Please take a look at this link:

 

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/An_Exeter_Waytale_Webtoon?id=oKeAEAAAQBAJ&hl=en_GB&gl=GB&PAffiliateID=1011laBkr