Panels are no longer the metronome of comics; your body is. As pages slide, zoom, and stack into vertical scrolls or tap‑to‑reveal frames, the delay between your finger movement and your next eye fixation quietly rewrites timing. Silence, jump cuts, and cliffhangers now live in the gap between two swipes, not between two printed gutters.
Digital platforms track saccadic eye movements and tap intervals with the same precision a lab uses for reaction time and signal processing. That data feeds interface design, which in turn reshapes narrative beat structure. A single panel can expand into an animated sequence, while a dense grid can collapse into a guided view that controls depth of field, turning pacing into a form of adaptive user experience rather than a fixed layout decision.
This shift alters the traditional authorship contract. Comics once encoded rhythm through static composition, relying on page turns and panel size as a kind of visual prosody. Now, variable refresh rates, touch latency, and screen aspect ratios function like a new grammar. Artists storyboard in layers and branches, anticipating divergent paths as readers pause, skim, or backtrack, so the story’s tempo becomes a negotiated process between creator intent and live human sensorimotor feedback.
As interfaces grow more responsive, the comic page behaves less like a painting and more like a responsive instrument that your hands and eyes play. The disruptive question is no longer how something is drawn, but who owns time inside the story when every gesture can stretch or compress it.
