While researching a topic, a student took the following notes:
- Late 1800s to early 1900s: Japanese manga (comics) typically used an orderly vertical format with four panels on each page.
- Late 1800s to late 1980s: Strongly influenced by manga, Taiwanese manhua (comics) also tended to use a structured layout.
- After 1945: Manga artists began experimenting with panels of different sizes to heighten visual tension (for example, by creating visual sight lines between a character in one panel and an object in the next).
- 1947 to late 1980s: Taiwanese manhua artists adopted additional manga traits, such as genre features and greater narrative complexity.