How do you as a comic artist slow down a moment without wasting panel space on endlessly similar panels?

[JoshRaed]

In a TV show or movie or even book you can show things like a character slowly reaching out for something or stuff like that to build up tension or have a calm intimate moment with a character. But in a comic story this kind of thing takes up quite a bit of page space. You can't exactly put the elevator scene from Evangelion into a comic. So what do you do instead when a moment like this pops up?

[SpookyLocker]

to slow down a moment add more words, the longer they have to read the slower it seems, where as if you want something fast paced less words

[darthmongoose]

You should read "Making Comics" by Scott McCloud. He talks a lot about this stuff.

I'm going to show some techniques that don't involve using words at all. Time manipulation is a really core part of being a great comics creator. You should definitely read some comics by Kiyohiko Azuma or Bryan Lee O'Malley to study this, because both of them have incredible mastery of panel timing.

So, our scenario is, "Bob grabs a can of coke and drinks it."

First example, very fast, we have two small panels. He grabs it, he drinks it.

Okay, now let's add in an extra panel where he reaches for it...then grabs it and drinks it.

Okay, cool, so that slowed things down, adding almost a hesitation or a sense of buildup to that action, and also pulling in on Bob for the drinking part, like we're really focusing in on that moment and lingering on it, slowed things down.

Now... what if, instead of adding more panels... we lengthen the panel where Bob reaches, and have his hand way over at the other side of the panel, as though it has longer to go to reach the cola?

Oho! That slowed things down even more!

...What other techniques could we use? All right. Let's add Alice. Alice is here to react to Bob reaching for and drinking the coke! Now let's slow this baby down to a crawl!

So in this one, we get a shot of the coke can in detail, because detail slows things down. Then we see Bob seeing the delicious cola, creating anticipation. We see him reach for it slowly across a long panel...and there's Alice looking on. We see her anticipation. We see Bob grab the can and Alice is pissed. We pull in on Bob taking a sip, lingering on it, then we pull out for a long, agonising panel where the glugs cross the space, and the glugs continue, drawing out that moment as we pull in on Alice's building anger.

So we're using more panels to really draw out the scene, but by having all the shots be different aspects of the scene, it removes the repetition. We use detail in shots to make the reader slow down to consider them more, we use longer panels, and put things further away from each other in panels to create distance that must be travelled, giving a sense of inertia.

Hope that's helpful!

[moontokkym]

Is... Is the elevator scene / scene in a different place with similar dialogue not in the manga? If it is you can just look in the manga to see how they did it.

There's also lots of manga that are slice of life/romance/political thrillers/murder mysteries where the pace is slower and with lots of important but long dialogue scenes you can use as study to see how they make them slow-paced and intense.

Also only have the characters just talking in an empty room unless you're going to use that empty room to emphasise something about the conversation. Other than that specific scenario characters are almost always passively doing something else (drinking at a bar, cleaning, taking care of one another, reading, preparing something, getting ready for something, etc...) That helps give the characters a prop and mouvement that allows you to use their body language and more easily express their feelings (giving them and obvious out to express when they're incomfortable for example) as well as give the scene a sense of forward momentum: start of the scene the room was messy, now it's clean, drink was full, now it's empty, book was being read, now it's closed and the character is fully focused, character was bleeding, now they're all bandaged up...

[VividRunning]

Differen't angles, maybe. And different cuts and stuff.