Study on visual characteristics of Naver webtoon sports genre

Sports webtoons are digital narrative forms centered on games and competition, making use of vertical scrolling, panel composition, and spacing unique to webtoons, while also inheriting visual elements and expressive techniques from traditional sports comics. This study categorizes the backgrounds in sports webtoons into spatial and non-spatial types for analysis. In terms of form, spatial backgrounds occupy the majority, realistically depicting the positions, movements, and hierarchical relationships of characters within the arena through perspective techniques, thereby enhancing both the realism of the match and the flow of the narrative. In contrast, decorative backgrounds highlight emotions such as tension, excitement, or frustration through colors and patterns, while non-backgrounds, close-ups, and objects contribute to scene transitions, psychological immersion, and the focus of the reader’s gaze. Color functions as a key device for adjusting the dramatic atmosphere and conveying the sense of speed in the game. By employing contrasts in saturation and brightness, important elements such as players, the ball, or the audience are emphasized, establishing a distinctive mood of tension in each work. Although texture appears less frequently than form or color, it is sometimes employed to represent the materiality of the stadium, sweat, or the dynamic motion of the ball, thereby reinforcing realism and reader engagement. Collectively, the backgrounds in sports webtoons go beyond mere spatial representation, serving to depict psychological states, intensify emotions, and produce dramatic effects. These findings demonstrate that sports webtoons not only inherit the narrative tradition of print comics but also establish an independent visual grammar by exploiting the unique characteristics of the digital medium.