Making a conversation scene interesting

A method I use quite often is to do a walk-and-talk. Have the characters move about their environments as they speak - either exploring it, or moving from point A to point B.

Also, visualise what they're talking about. If they're discussing something that happened elsewhere, or earlier in the story, or something they dreamed, or if they're debating what to do in the future - draw panels that visually represents that. If they're discussing something they did earlier, draw a panel of them doing the thing. If they're discussing something that's going to happen in the future, draw what they imagine that would look like, etc.

The first 12 or so pages of West are pure conversation so it definitely had the potential to be a very boring introduction.

Like @AnnaLandin I made it more engaging by having the characters do stuff. Jed loads his boat, the old man pontificates from his box, etc.

And though they don't actually move anywhere, the body language and expressions are constantly changing.

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I also played with distance shots and creative paneling

Lots of comics rely on conversation without you (the reader) even realising what's happening.

These are nice examples of other conversations:

The World In The Morning44 On the sofa
Hyperdriven23 In a taxi
Sweet Talk15 In the car

Good Luck!

yes i have this problem too. I often have scenes of police chiefs sat behind desks as they talk about cases. flashbacks are useful to put action in these pages.

@azureXtwilight Aaaah - well, that kind of strip-style conversation can easily get very boring and repetitive, yes.

The main issues with the example you posted are 1.) There is no background. They are literally living in a white box. That alone makes it look flat and boring. 2.) NO BODY LANGUAGE. These people are just talking with perfect blankness. There's no emotion at all, no reactions to what is being spoken. It's flat and it's static and if those speech bubbles were empty, I would have NO IDEA how those people felt about what they were saying.

Make them gesture when they speak, give them actual facial expressions, make them react to the conversation being held - if you don't, and just let them stand there, they look like cardboard cutouts.

One big thing that I try to consider is giving the scene an emotional purpose, in addition to its informative purpose.
I really liked something I read in Ryan North's Back to the Future analysis blog13 (which I actually super recommend (EDIT: I went back and read the whole blog again b/c it's great and here's the entry I was thinking of23)) where the characters had to introduce themselves to each other. It's small, but a boring bit of talking by definition -- you already know these characters' names -- but it's also required or else it's weird. He commented on one version of the exchange that emphasised the awkwardness of these characters meeting each other. That's good, he said, because you're getting something else out of the scene -- any time you have boring words that need to happen, try to at least get a character moment out of it. I think that's really good advice!

My comic opens on exposition -- Sev explaining how magic works -- but it's also a chance for us to meet this ridiculous guy talking about his latest "great idea" while his best friend watches with the kind of dubious amusement that implies she's seen a million of these stunts, and they never go well. I wanted the conversation to be just as much about who these characters are and how they feel about each other as it is about the information you're getting.

I feel like this applies even if you're showing flashback visuals or something. I tried flashback visuals to attempt to make both of Jonan's monologues interesting, but I think it worked on the first one18 much better than the second8, because the second is literally just an illustration of what he's saying -- it's honestly kinda redundant and doesn't give us anything other than information. Whereas the first one, in addition to telling us what happened, also shows us that Jonan's version of the story doesn't quite match what happened, which automatically tells us a lot about Jonan himself. There's a secondary emotional purpose there that you're picking up on that makes it way more interesting.

So I do my best to approach all "infodump" scenes that way -- make it a chance to learn something about the characters. Sometimes that's visual -- just seeing how the characters respond to it, with body language and expression -- and sometimes that's a storytelling choice, putting info in a position where it can be argued over or bring two characters closer together or show us something unexpected about the guy who knows the info.

I'd recommend stretching facial expressions and playing with body posture/movements? It'll make the page more fun to draw and also puts a little variation into the panels rather than just rehashing the same 2 facial expressions for the whole page. Here's an example of what I try with one of my more expressive characters (it's pretty old so please excuse those ugly speech bubbles)

vs something like

which is a pretty repetitive pattern for conversations in some popular comics i read on here :/ keeping facial expressions limited can just make things seem bland and give you the feeling you've already seen this exact page about 40 times in the comic before.

Ahh, I feel the body language in the conversation is pretty good, but I feel like the bubble placement and overall layout feels a bit cluttered. I had trouble following the dialogue throughout the page. I think you could really benefit with clearer gutters to divide the moments. The dark background fading into a black gutter line is really hard to make out.

Also, the bubbles might look cluttered to me because I'm viewing it from mobile. XD So I can't be sure.

Other than that, I feel you are on the right track! : >

What I've been trying to do in my recent pages is to give the conversation secondary action, which lets me move the characters around and gives the reader something else to look at/pay attention to while the conversation is happening. In one of the first scenes of Nocturne5, the conversation between Lexi and Brandi is happening while they're bartending, so the girls are filling drinks, talking with customers, etc. while the main dialogue is happening. I don't think I executed this as well as I would have liked, but it comes with practice. In CH2, I'm exploring this method in a few other scenes and hope to do so in a better light.

Funny enough, it's usually the action-y scenes that I'm worried about for this reason. They're necessary to move the story from point A to point B, but they just seem so boring? XD; All I want is for character X to stab character Y, but I have to actually show how the fight goes...

Though that's probably more of a writing concern than a visual concern.

Something else I've seen but probably isn't a good idea unless its related to the story somehow is having a character who's not part of the conversation doing something in the background, whether funny or not. Doing that takes attention from the conversation though, which is why you only want to do it if it's important to the plot or character development

Hm some advice I got from an interview (i think?) I listened to of Lora Innes who does the amazing webcomic The Dreamer–plan out the conversation scene, then try to see if the emotional beats still come across well without the text. Of course the text holds the important information, but it's a good way to gauge how the characters themselves are reacting to the conversation–is one character calm and collected, while the other is irritated and angry? Does one character want something from the other character? Or maybe they're both good friends and in agreement about something. Like people have said before, the body language and facial expressions can give a good sense of this!

I don't know exactly how qualified I am to answer this question (considering my comic is dialogue-free), but I thought that I could give some general advice.

1. Make sure what they are saying is actually interesting, I know this seems kind of obvious but content in dialogue is really important. Make sure what the characters are saying makes sense. Try to take meaningless or repetitive rhetoric out, speaking of which that transitions me into my next tip.

2. Pace the dialogue appropriately. I've seen waaaaaaay too many comics that have technically good art, good atmosphere, and probably a good story, that I've just glossed over because there was too much to read this for example34. I know that makes me sound lazy, but you'll find that walls of text fitted into a three to four panel section really isn't appealing. There is a whole section on Tapastic for novels, I go to the comics section because I'm too lazy to read and I like pretty pictures. On the other hand, you shouldn't make the conversation too spread out. Unless you do it right and on purpose, dialogue spread thin seems like it takes forever to get to the point.

3. Use expressions and body language to tell part of the story. Though the main focus of a conversation scene is... well the conversation, you can still use visuals to make it interesting. Make the characters emote, unless it's in-character for someone to be completely rigid (like if they were a robot or whatever), they would probably be doing something. While they're talking they could be: fiddling with a watch, looking away in boredom, leaning on the arm of a chair, chewing on the end of a pen, millions of different things that add character and life to an interaction.

4. Uhh.... yeah. I'm done. I think

A lot of helpful tips here, awesome! Personally I've been working through a very dialogue heavy scene for the next chapter of my comic No-Good Heroes, and I mostly stuck the rule that they would be doing something, even if it's something very mundane like, pouring a cup of coffee, or exploring the environment (if it's a place they've never been before).