I broke down what went in to making a FOUR PAGE long conversation not (hopefully) overly tedious to read
The conversation can be read here without the added commentary
P.S. I'm an amateur and have no idea what I'm doing. Send help.
Whatever you do, do NOT fill an entire panel with a lifetime supply of text. There are intuitive parts of a conversation that require showing what a person does or says while they're talking.
Try watching a scene from a favourite movie and make a note of what the camera shows, and what people are doing while they're talking.
Do they have a prop that they use? Are they really expressive with their hands? Are they anxious, fidgeting about? Are they angry and pacing about the room? Is the moon out, capturing one character's imagination as they muse in it's light?
You should also consider the mood of the scene. Is it tense? Maybe you want an ominous shot up at an animal's head mounted on the wall. Maybe you want to show the dramatic shadow from a roaring fire sweeping across the floor, giving a sense of plotting going on. Perhaps it's a peaceful time, where you can let reader's eyes wander through the natural wonders of the forest: a closeup on a flower, a bug crawling up a tree while the characters walk past in the background. Maybe it's a villain who's cornered our hero, so you tilt the perspectives to personify the imbalance of power.
Use the conversation to your advantage to give people a tour of your world without having to tell them about it through exposition.
watch 12 angry men, masterpiece of making a bunch of people talking interesting.
Mostly add fun things, make them move around bring, visual concepts, change the background,etc.
Gosh zooming in on the hands is such a good idea. I wish I heard that before starting on the 10-odd page conversation I'm doing right now. I mostly relied on gestures, facial expressions, and camera zoom/angle to make it look interesting. It still looks alright, but could definitely be better.
Constructive criticism totally welcome if anyone wants to give it:
I like to innovate on the shot angles. They give some nice visual variation. You can also focus on different things, like their expressions or things they might be doing while talking, like fidgeting something.
Characters taking very long conversation? That's a challenge comic artists have to deal often! Maybe we can take inspiration from this
4
It's the easiest.
Or you can break up the long sentences into a bunch of smaller sentences, give each a balloon, then place them on nothing but solid color background
With vertical-scrolling comics, you can take advantage of bigger gutter to place the balloons. Just my 2 cents, others have pointed out more advanced tricks.
It is tbh best to analyze dialogues in film? I believe the video I attached made me learn a lot about using cameras angles for comics.
1) Get to the point sooner. Write a more powerful and concise conversation.
2) Split the conversation among different moments/issues.
You probably don't need to include every point in that one conversation, right there.
3) No matter how interesting you make the pictures/presentation, it's the same amount of words being read by your readers. Adding pretty things around it- does not change the fact that it's too much reading.
4) If YOU know it's too wordy, the readers will too. And I can promise you, you have WAY more patience than them.
Follow your gut.
Follow these simple rules.
a) If you hope they don't notice it, remove it.
b) If you hope they don't catch it, fix it.
c) If you skip over it when YOU read it, edit it.
d) Ignore how long or hard you worked on something. If it doesn't work, rework it.
e) If YOU notice it, your readers will too.
f) You story must work when you quickly scan through the pages (pretty much without reading ANY text)
g) And it must work on repeat reads.
(Is taking notes, because her characters also talk a lot.)
Anyway what I do is sometimes showing the thing they're talking about or drawing a panel showing a window or some other thing in the room.
just my 2 cents here but from my experience if you expect me to read a long conversation or a wall of text. I first have to be immersed in your comic enough to care or spend my time reading it
I'm also lost guys. This is a gold mine of information. Keep it coming!
I spent the first 20+ pages with very little dialogue, and now that there's a semi-long conversation, I'm fumbling around trying to make the panels interesting.
Have you ever noticed that most movies characters always seem to be doing something, or going somewhere? This is because it makes the scene more interesting to look at during conversations. A common one is having them eat, it gives you a lot of different gestures to possibly focus on, plus, you can draw the food as a focal point sometimes. Eating food is also a surprisingly intimate thing to do sometimes, and you can use it as a storytelling device as well. (IE. Someone is nervous and picking at their food instead of eating it, maybe someone is the opposite and stuff their face...)
I also like to place people in busy locations, maybe there's a crowd around them, you can do focus shots of crowds, pan out, pan in. Or place them in an interesting location with pretty buildings, scenery, or even just some posters in a bedroom.
If you're ever super lost, try finding a scene in one of your favorite movies, and treat each time the camera angle changes as a panel and learn from that. 
This somehow turn out hella informative, there are hella more tricks to steal than I thought, thank you guys, your secret techniques are all mine now, muahuahuahuahua.
Yo, I got this. Heavy Horns is like 90% conversations xD
Take for example one of my most stripped down convos, starting from this episode, 6.16
all the way through episode 6.21 is just two guys sitting on a bed talking.
I employ a lot of the techniques already mentioned, but my favorite go-tos are panels focusing on character facial expression, different camera angles, and panels showing body language.
I'm going to approach this a little differently.
I often find you can cut more dialogue than you think you can. What's really important to say, both in terms of moving the plot, creating an interesting moment, and building character dimensions?
I often read comics and think, why does the creator feel the need to explain so much? And why do the characters talk a lot but say very little. Often 4 pages can be cut to 2, which makes the work half as difficult.
Oh I've reminded of something. Some recent movies / TV shows about crime I've watched has the characters discussing profile of the criminals in depth. While discussing, they're just talking and standing circling a table (with some body gesture), but the camera is revolving with that table as pivot like crazy. Quite nausea-inducing, but maybe worth to try in a comic...? just idea, I haven't seen that in comics nor I plan to do so actually
Random but, is this David Fincher's Mindhunter? Also for a show that mostly involves a lot of talking on a desk it really works.
1 month later
