Making Comics With Meesh | Intro and Basic Comic Flow (Patreon)

At Anthro New England, I held a panel about the basics of making comics: Comic flow, panel structure, page composition, etc etc. I've been meaning to get the gist of this presentation up on the Patreon for a while, and with this breathing room I've given myself, it's finally time to do it. 

I created this presentation because there are some basic mistakes I see a lot in the fandom regarding readability in comics. So basic, that I could sum up most of them in a 35 minute powerpoint. These rules are not set in stone and everyone is free to ignore the advice I have to give, but I feel like these guidelines are very helpful for budding comic artists who are intimidated by the immense possibilities within the medium. And so this presentation wasn't really about how to draw comics, but how to construct comics.

My guess is that if you're making a comic, your goal with that comic is to tell a story. So the intent as you create each page should be to tell that story with clarity and purpose. With more experience comes the ability to tell your story in more unique ways, but for now we'll start from the top.

BASIC COMIC FLOW

Most books and comics in the USA are made and intended to be read from left to right, top to bottom. If you've been reading for a while, you likely do this automatically and without thinking about it. You'll want to try and make the experience similar for your audience, so that they can glide through your page without hitting snags and wondering which panel or balloon goes next.

With panels broken up in the example above, your average reader will attempt to read the page in the numbered order. The page is sectioned in big horizontal chunks of panels, read left to right, before the reader will go down the page.

You can see these horizontal chunks highlighted in both of these examples, even when the junction of panels is in a series of crosses, as in the example on the right. This 9-panel structure was used for many of the pages in the famous comic Watchmen. When they adopted this structure, there was concern that readers may try to read them as columns rather than rows. However, the flow was maintained as rows, and this flow never deviated, so readers could be confident that in any given page, they were meant to read through as rows. Maintaining this consistency for your own comics is essential for readability.

In this following image, we see examples of potential paths an artist could take in planning their page:

In the left example, panel flow is maintained left to right, top to bottom for the entire page, and is easy to understand. However, in the center example, the order is switched abruptly from reading as a row, to reading as a column. You can understand how this would throw the reader for a loop. 

The example on the right gets even trickier, with a zigzag of panels. A transition from panel 3 to 4 makes sense, and establishes reading as a row, but must switch to reading as a column so that the final panel is panel 7. If the reader attempted to maintain reading as a row, the final panel would be 6, which being on the left side of the page, doesn't make much sense.

A safer route through the example on the right would be to make the structure 1>2>3>5>6>4>7, but is still messy and has the chance of leading readers astray. I don't mean to suggest that switching between columns and rows is a bad thing, but the panel structure needs to say loud and clear "we're going in this direction now". It's nearly always better to have a page that's basic and understandable, than fancy and indecipherable. Unless being indecipherable is your intent, of course.

That'll do it for this installment of Making Comics With Meesh. In the next episode, we'll talk more about panel planning and timing, and there is a lot to unpack with that. I hope you found this informative! I'd be happy to answer any further questions about what I covered here in the comments.