A webtoon is a comic built to be read by scrolling straight down a phone screen: one continuous vertical strip, no page turns, no spine. On BookZeta you build one in Graphic Mode, the same canvas used for comics and graphic novels, with webtoon dimensions and vertical layouts instead of print pages.

This article covers making one. For getting the finished file out, see Exporting webtoons.

Start a webtoon project

Start a new project from the create screen, choose the Graphic creation mode, and set Format Type to Webtoon.

That one dropdown matters more than it looks: it sets the canvas to the 800px-wide vertical format and removes the spine and back cover that print formats have. Picking Comic and trying to convert later means rebuilding your layouts.

Fill in the target audience, genre and sub-genres, then a title and a synopsis describing your story.

Build your cast before your pages

The wizard walks you through it in the right order: characters, then settings, then story details, then generate.

Do the characters properly. Each one gets a fixed physical identity that the image generator reuses on every panel, plus up to three named outfits, so your lead looks like the same person in episode one and episode twelve. Setting this up once is what separates a webtoon that looks like a series from a set of unrelated illustrations. See Creating characters, settings and entities and Portraits, outfits and consistency.

Settings work the same way. A recurring cafe, classroom or rooftop stays recognizable when it is defined as a setting rather than re-described in each panel prompt.

Pick a style and stay with it

Graphic Mode ships with a range of comic styles including webtoon and manhwa looks, plus manga, anime cel, noir, modern comic and more. Browse them before you generate a full episode, because switching styles halfway through is visible to readers immediately.

Two style notes specific to webtoons:

• Flat, high-contrast styles read better on phones than dense, heavily textured ones. Detail that looks rich on a monitor turns to noise at phone width.
• Color is doing navigation work. Vertical scroll has no page boundaries, so a shift in palette is often how a reader knows a scene has changed.

Compose for the scroll, not the page

This is the part that trips up comic artists moving to webtoon.

• One beat at a time. The reader sees roughly one phone screen at a time, so a panel that would share a page with five others now gets the whole view. Big moments can occupy an entire screen height.
• Use vertical gaps as timing. Empty space between panels is a pause. A long gap before a reveal creates suspense that a page layout cannot.
• Avoid wide multi-panel rows. Anything that needs horizontal scanning breaks on a narrow screen.
• Keep the reading order strictly top to bottom. There is no left-to-right in a webtoon strip, and a panel placed beside another is a guess about what the reader looks at first.

Art, dialogue and lettering

Generate panel art from the canvas, either as a full image with text baked in or as text-as-layers, which generates the background separately and puts dialogue on editable layers over it. Text-as-layers costs fewer Creation Points and lets you fix a line without regenerating the art, which is usually what you want while a script is still moving.

Add dialogue with the speech bubble tools (around eleven bubble styles plus narration boxes). When you generate with bubbles, a vision pass reads the finished panel and places the dialogue so it does not cover faces. You can always drag it afterwards. Details in Speech bubbles and panels and Generating AI artwork.

Keep lettering large. Text that is comfortable on a desktop canvas is often unreadable at phone size, and there is no zoom in most webtoon readers.

Think in episodes

Webtoon readers expect a serialized rhythm: a self-contained episode that ends on a hook, then the next one. Plan the beats that way from the start rather than slicing a finished long story into arbitrary chunks. If your webtoon is going to be a series, set up a Series Bible so the cast carries cleanly between episodes.

Before you export

• Scroll the whole episode on an actual phone, not a desktop preview.
• Check every panel's reading order, since slices are numbered and a page built out of order reads out of order.
• Confirm no dialogue is sitting over a face or running off the edge.
• Check that scene changes are visible without the dialogue explaining them.

Then head to Publish & Export and pick either the numbered image slices for uploading to a vertical-scroll platform, or the HTML viewer for hosting it yourself. Exporting webtoons covers which to choose.

New to the format? The webtoon creator overview shows what BookZeta makes end to end, and how to make a webtoon covers planning an episode before you build it.