How to: Comic Panels

Welcome to my first “How-to…” guide! This one’s about comic panels and what you should think of when making them, enjoy! (^ > ^ )

Now, before you even think about grabbing a pencil and start drawing the comic, there’s one very important thing that you need to do first. WRITE DOWN YOUR STORY along with the dialogues for the characters! I can’t stress enough how important this is, because if you’re making the story up as you go, then the risk of “writing yourself into a corner” will get bigger!

Use your script as a backbone, then if you want to change something later, you can do that as you please! Since you’ve already written it all, you can go have a look at the later chapters to see if that little change you did will have any impact on the story later on – this is how I do it! (^ v ^ )
Of course, this technique is best suited for long stories, like mine for Pierre the Baking Cat. If you’re doing gag-a-day comics, you do not need to worry about this kind of stuff :D

Anyways, assuming that you have your story (and dialogue) thought out, you are now ready to start creating! The first thing you’ve got to do when you’re starting on a brand new comic page, is planning how your panels will be layed out. Therefore, I’m going to talk about just that on this page. I hope you’ll enjoy this little “guide” I’ve put together :p Enjoy!

Plan your panel layout

Very important step! This is where you decide on camera angles, close-up shots, where the characters will be positioned, speech bubble placement etc., etc!

Camera angles? Close-ups? Speech bub- What!? Some of you might feel that you know absolutely nothing about the “thinking” behind the comic panel layout process (like me, when I first started making this comic). Then do as I did and devote some time to just “study” the comic panels in your favorite comic!
I have a pile of Japanese manga pockets at my place, and one day when I was trying to come up with ideas for how the heck I was supposed to draw the panels on that page I was working on, I thought “Hmm, what would a Japanese manga pro” do? So I gathered some random pockets from my collection and started to look at how they had used the space given on the pages, how they had placed everything, how they use their screentones and so on.

I got lots and lots of ideas form this and I can highly recommend it if you’re out of ideas!
If you don’t own any manga yourself, just check out sites that provide free manga, like Manga Fox or just buy some off of eBay.

“Okay, I’ve got my hands on some manga (or other comic), but what exactly am I looking for?”, you might ask. Well, start by just looking at the comic panels. How are they shaped? What’s going on inside the panel? What feeling do you think the author is trying to convey by shaping/positioning the panel like this? What differences can you see between a panel that contains action and a panel that is trying to be calm or peaceful?

Reading order

Western comics are read from left to right, from top to down. Japanese comics are read the opposite way (see below). In the following examples I’m going to be nice with you and go by the western way, aren’t I nice? (^ . ^ *)

Gotta think of the flow!

In order to get achieve a nice flow in your comic, you’ve got to think about the placements of the comic panels. Have a look at the examples below:

As you can see, example B is much easier to read than A. Why is this?
Well, first off, in B there’s only five panels. This is also something to have in mind when you plan your panel layouts. Don’t have to many panels on one page! 5-6 panels are enough. Anything above that just makes the page feel crammed.

Secondly, the positioning of the panels in example A have little to no structure what so ever. As you can see, I’ve numbered the panels in the correct reading order, but even then it’s confusing! All this kind of leads me to the next topic, which is…

Panel spacing

This is somewhat related to the topic above. By using the right spacing technique, you can make the comic easier to read and avoid any confusion about what panels to read in what order. Have a look at the example below:

In example A, the horizontal space is larger than the vertical. This indicates to the reader that he/she should read the panels on the top row first, before proceeding to the one in the lower left corner.

Example B has got more vertical space than the horizontal, which will tell the reader to read the page like the blue arrow indicates, simple huh? :D

Variation

A comic should be funny, interesting and easy to read. Avoid making all the panels the same size and shape. Oh, and don’t forget what I told you about putting to many of them on the same page ;)

Example A looks dull and a bit confusing. Example B, on the other hand, has got more variation and fewer panels, which makes it easier and more interesting to read.

Panels with different shapes

By changing the shape of the panel, you can effectively express movement and action in your comic. And as with everything else – don’t overdo it! Take a look at the examples below:

In the left example, all panels have different shapes and sizes and it’s hard to know what’s what! As mentioned above, an author can choose to do this to express speed, movement, energy, concentration, intensity etc. And this should be used sparely for best effect.

The right example has got one “intense” panel at the top, which makes it stand out better. The surrounding panels follow its shape to make them fit better together (this is how I usually do it). I’ve looked at my Japanese mangas, to see how they do it, and I think they do something similar, but please feel free to experiment!

To sum it up, I guess you could say that the size of the panel increases the more feelings you want to express with it. Let me give you an example:

Let’s say that you want to draw a young girl mourning at her dead parents grave. Would you rather draw the gravestones, the girl, maybe a church, trees etc. in many small panels? Or would you draw all that in one big panel? I’d choose the latter :p Much more impact and feeling that way!

Get it? (^_^ )

Drawing the panels

You have two choices here; either draw the panels old-school by hand, using only paper, pencil and a ruler OR you can do it digitally… What do I do? I do it digitally, baby! :D

I use Adobe Illustrator for this, but if you don’t have that you might as well use a free vector program called Inkscape. Now don’t you dissin’ this program because it’s free :) If I didn’t have Illustrator I’d be using this myself!

Besides, you’re only going to use this program to:

- Draw the comic panels
- Make and position the speech bubbles
- Write the text inside the speech bubbles
- Print the comic when it’s done?

That’s it! No need to learn the advanced stuff here ;)
In an attempt to help you newcomers out there, I’ve gone so far as to prepare a special comic page for you! Download one of the files below and have a look at how I usually set up the layers, panels, speech bubbles, text etc. Oh, and I’m using a font called “Komika Text”, which you can download for free from Dafont.com. Grab it here if you want it.

If you want to check out the comic page I’ve prepared (which is really sloppy drawn, since I only made it to demonstrate) you can choose between an Illustrator file or Inkscape file, here you go!

Conclusion

Well, that’s all I had to say about comic panels for this time. Most of this stuff is pretty logical, but hopefully this guide will be helpful to some beginner comic artist out there :)
I think I have some more stuff that I could write a How-to for, hehe (^ ^ ) Well, I’ll let you know through my twitter when it’s done alright? See ya!

/T