Questions About Paneling Best Practices

[a.g.meade]

Hey everyone!

I was wondering if the community might be able to share some insights and/or resources about paneling best practices for traditionally-formatted comics. I would also greatly appreciate if someone could weigh in on panels and how they influence pacing.

(NB: I've done a good amount of research and know there's nothing fundamentally wrong with having a page full of rectangular frames, but I seem to have gotten stuck on this notion of 'a minimum of 5 panels per page, and ideally more'.)

Thank you in advance!

[darthmongoose]

Panels are one of those things in comics that are easy to learn but hard to master. There's so much to them!

I'll try to give an overview of some of the bigger factors in panel layouts I've learned:

The bigger the panel, the more important the moment and the longer its perceived duration because the reader will linger on it longer and it literally takes up more of the page.

Bleed panels (panels that go right to the edge of the page) are less constrained by time than "closed" panels. So if you make something full-bleed, it'll feel big, expansive and epic like a big moment, a long take or a slow-mo or freeze frame shot, but it won't feel snappy.

Lots of small, closed panels will feel like a quickfire sequence of events. For example a flurry of quick punches, or an argument that spirals out of control.
A few big panels will feel slower and more expansive.

Space slows the reader down. A small character in a big panel and a bunch of empty space or just scenery can slow the reader down to make them ponder a bit.

Space can also be used to show travel. A character facing right at the left side of the panel is about to or planning to move to the right, but hasn't yet, so it feels like winding up to go. A character facing right at the right side of the panel has just crossed that distance or is currently moving very fast.
Characters facing left can often feel like obstacles, and characters moving left can look like they're moving "backwards" or running away, while characters moving right are advancing.

Small panels force you to either pull right in on the character and not their surroundings, which will have the effect of making the scene feel clautrophobic or like the character's focus has narrowed very tightly to just that person or themselves (can be good in a tense situation) OR force you to make characters quite small in panels so you can barely see their expressions, which makes the story feel more about what characters are doing rather than thinking, leading to an emotionally detached, objective feeling that may evoke old fashioned comics.

Panels that aren't square or rectangles are best saved for action or intense emotion. If used too much, they start losing impact as a way to put emphasis on things. Kinda like overusing italics or exclamation marks in writing!

[a.g.meade]

@darthmongoose - Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights here - I appreciate your help more than I can say. This is really, really helpful and I'm excited to try applying these concepts to future pages! Lots to think about here, in a good way!

[OffBased]

Yeah, pretty much everything darthmongoose said. There’s so much one can do with shape and size of panels and amount of panels per page to influence pacing and tone.

I’d also like to add to her point that using lots of panels of the same size (or the same layout of panels) influences the “tempo” of the page. Every action feels like it happens in a similar amount of time and you read each panel to drive on to the next “beat”. I see it most prominently in strips. It can lend itself to a very conversational kind of flow, perfect for a a Sunday newspaper-y comic. But it isn’t absent in the page. Jeff Smith did this a lot in Bone, with these staggered six panel pages where characters did more talking than anything. Will Eisner goes into this at length in Comics and Sequential Art. The chapter on “the frame” as he calls it takes up about a third of the whole book!

[IndigoShirtProd]

@darthmongoose gave a great explanation of the multiple aspects of panels and how they subconsciously inform the reader of what is going on and how long things will feel while reading.

I like to include speech bubbles in discussions about panelling because they go hand in hand. Speech bubbles (sb's) can be a guiding element and contribute to the flow of the page. If the comic is read from left to right, then sb's best practice is to start in the upper left and end in the lower right, snaking the bubbles around the panels. Make the bubbles smaller for less important dialogue or soft spoken words and larger for important dialogue or shouting.

There's also the matter of confining bubbles to a panel, whether that be having the bubble border with the panel or having the full sb reside inside a panel. This can be a stylistic choice or inform the reader that whatever is being said is wholly confined to the moment being shown in the panel. I see sb's that are not confined to panels as not a part of a strict moment, rather, they inform of the more loose apect of conversation. Since thethey are free fom the barriers of a panel, they fill in the space (the time) between them and allow you to base resctions around them so to better express the impact of a conversation on characters.

The shape on bubbles is important in showing emotion or whether the character is speaking or thinking. The color of the text and the bubble can also be informative in this way, or they can solely be stylistically driven.

[Kaydreamer]

That's SO freaking helpful, thank you. I'm saving that.

[skicoak]

Characters facing left can often feel like obstacles, and characters moving left can look like they're moving "backwards" or running away, while characters moving right are advancing.

To add onto this point...and we see this more in other visual media but it creeps into comics too...

Some creators use the left towards right movement to associate with positive/good characters and the right side moving left as negative/bad characters. Link goes to a video discussing it in more detail.

https://kottke.org/16/02/left-to-right-character-movement-in-movies#:~:text=In%20film%20and%20video%2C%20which,way%20is%20viewed%20more%20negatively.

[a.g.meade]

@OffBased - Thank you so much for weighing in here. I hadn't thought about panel size creating tempo, so I'll definitely keep that in mind. And oh yes, I've read that book - so incredibly valuable! I'll have to give the Panels chapter another read-through.

@IndigoShirtProd - Thank you very much for your insights! I hadn't thought about speech bubble size! I've been making all of mine just fit the text, so that's good information for sure.

@skicoak - Thank you very much for the information and this video! I really appreciate you sharing this. I'd never noticed the direction of the character movement correlating with good vs bad - that's really good to keep in mind for visual development!

[Aleksei]

Oh! This is what I have learned Some of it will be already told by the others, but here it is anyway~

1) Every page is your universe, and so, every panel occupies space in your universe. As you may know, space and time are intimately related, so, the more the space, the more time you use from your page (universe). A little square may be percieved as a little amount of seconds, and so, just little bubble speechs can be logically there, while a big horizontal panel should have more bubbles. 2, or 3. This is the basic rule.
How to create a rythm with this basic knowledge is up to you. You can do 3 squares, and 2 big horizontal; Separate an horizontal panel for a couple of square panel; have some vertical that breaks the horizontal reading, etc.

2) Also, the panels alone have an impact imbued withim them. How's that? Well, an splash page, where only 1 draw fills the page has a more impact that a little square panel. The same with a slash-double-page panel. BUT that doesn't mean that, as they uses so much of your universe space will use that much time. The impact of the panel will brake the space-time rule. So, for more important scenes, scenes where you are situating your characters on set, where you present an important character, where something important will be said, it will have to be a more impacting panel -no little squares here; horizontal, verticals and splash, and it depends to the writter if the impact will be enough to brake the time rule, or keep it.

Lastly, there are a lot of more panels to play, because you are not constrained as a movie, with an square. You can do circle panels, star panels, triangle panels, characters that are out of panel, etc. Everything that breaks the rule number 1, will have a more impact, though.

That's all the information I know.
n_n!

[a.g.meade]

@Aleksei - Thank you so much for this information! I really appreciate it. I'm definitely going to think more on perceived time based on panel size, as well as how the impact of an individual panel can contribute to the storytelling.