Comic Analysis - Bubbles and Panels Are Actors Too (Patreon)

As I've been working on my graphic novel, I've been trying to make a conscious effort to find ways to improve my comic making. I've written about some comics in the past and what lessons I've learned from them before. It's been a bit since I've written about them so this post can try to explain some of those old concepts a little clearer as a recap. A few manga I've been really loving lately have made me aware of something that seems pretty obvious but I've only now been trying to think about as I complete pages. There are some mangaka out there that really know how to play with layout and using all the elements outside of the art to add to how the story is told. It's really cool to see how those things can have just as much of a unique style as the actual drawings. What I've specifically been wowed by is the use of speech bubbles as an equally important element in the heirarchy of emphasis within any given panel. I'll try to explain what I mean with some examples.

The first manga I want to look at is actually in my top 3 manga for me personally, it's called How Do We Relationship? (which I personally think is a terrible title, compared to what was being used before being localized, "So, Do You Want to Go Out?"). It's a story about two women in college in Japan that come out as gay to each other and start dating out of convenience, only to find out that they have their own issues to work on that drive them apart. The author describes the pitch as a romance story about what happens after the main couple starts going out and breaks up and how their lives continue on. Besides the really great cartoony art that's both cute and sexy when it wants to be, it really has an emotional maturity to it's storytelling and cares to make it's cast of characters really complex, going through more nuanced struggles that really fit them being past the annoying high school age where they don't understand basic emotions. It's very refreshing and has been one of the biggest influences on the direction of my works and I strongly recommend it to anyone that gets some kind of enjoyment out of my stuff.

I'm going to be talking about a small arc in book 5 which is a bit of the way into the story, so spoiler warning if you care to go into the series blind! This specific part of the story is after the main girls, Miwa and Saeko have broken up and Miwa reconnects with her first crush from high school that was could never find the guts to confess to out of fear that she wouldn't reciprocate feelings for another girl.

Like I've mentioned in comic analyses in the past, I like to view the flow of comic pages in distinct rows that function to split up the main beats. You can then change the size of your panels in relation to the others based on their importance to a scene. This doesn't always have to mean "more important = bigger" either, but maybe we'll see some examples. What I want to focus on here is that I've been noticing an extra layer above that which can feed into this heirarchy of importance; the size of text and speech bubbles can be played with depending on it's importance to the panel. I'm not entirely sure if pages end up this way because of localization and the bubbles being drawn in to match their japanese text before we have to squeeze in english letters in the same space, but taking it as we get it I still think it's a great tool to have in your tool belt as a comic artist.

The first panel here Miwa's dad is talking about why her mom blew up at her for asking permission to move out on her own and start to develop independence from her parents. It's a bit of a emotion reveal that builds out these minor characters and their relationship to Miwa, and it's sort of the crux of why they're outside talking and the art takes up a full row to match. The shot is up close to his head because his body language here is not very important, you just want to know what expression he's showing on his face as he delivers this line. His words are important but they also need the context of his face to really get the vibe hes getting across so his face takes up the majority of that space in the top row. Immediately in the next panel, Miwa responds humorously to her dad's sentimentality. The camera takes a view to show them in relation to each other to give us context to their dynamic, but I think the interesting thing here is that you could technically draw a line right through the center of the panel and the bubbles and drawing take up the same amount of space. The same can be said for the panel after but if you split it vertically.

The text on these panels stays the same size as the panel above it to take up proportionally a lot more space in both examples. What I find useful to think about too as that these bubbles taking up space aren't even being utilized here as a way to shortcut adding detail to the artwork. These two panels here have a lot of visual information in general just by them both having the environment present, so to me it has more purpose than that. Again, the words are what's most important in this exchange that extra acting context isn't really necessary. If the intention was different, I could see that right panel being split in two to have Miwa start speaking, and then finish the second bubble on a new panel with a closer zoom on her face or body language. I find that any time there's a character saying something that has multiple bubbles worth of information but it's all in one panel, it's a specific choice to not overact the scene and let the moment breeze by faster.

The bottom panel is the final beat of page, Miwa's dad realizes that they need to let their daughter go and live her life and be supportive of her decision as the final sort of epiphany moment, so it also gets it's own row. The difference between this panel and the first one is that his message is really the focus here and although the art has to fill the whole panel, the size of the characters is smaller than the individual bubbles.

Compare it to this other page where Miwa gets to finally see her crush again after resolving to pursue a relationship with her, the importance of Miwa just getting to see her and confirm her feelings is amplified with the sheer size of the top panels to let the moment breathe and really soak in (the size of the two panels being close to the same is good so the reader understands where both of them are at emotionally as this scene starts and we can plant ourselves in Miwa's shoes to see how she thinks and where she goes from here. I think the bubbles from panels 2 into 3 does something interesting too, starting from so small to contextually larger than the characters can function as like a return to the normal flow, if we were to say that the moment right above was almost in slow motion. The words take importance again as Miwa has to interact and try to keep her cool and try to present in a way that can bring them closer together.

I'll only go over a few more pages since it's pretty easy to pick up on the idea once you start to think about it. This one has some good contrast on a big emphasis on Miwa's irrational fears of diving leading her to making a crazy statement thats meant for laughs, and the actual invasive thought is what is being displayed here right in the center. It completely dominates the panel. Miwa's crush (I don't remember her name) responds with some sentiments that despite being split between 3 panels to show how the acting changes as she speaks, it's really the thing you need to be paying attention to.

It's also a good example of the top row being the first beat, like a call, and the bottom row function together as one response, and the bottom row is how the moment concludes. It's a 3 part bit of information given to us that knows exactly where to make it's breaks, kind of as if moving to a new row is a period at the end of a sentence. There's a guideline of comics lettering that tells us to try to avoid hyphenating words and splitting them on rows so our messages are legible and I think the concept of using rows as beats is a visual example of a similar principle.

This other page also has some great examples of how the size of the panels doesn't need to inform how much visual information is presented. The first panel is smaller than the second but has our establishing information, we know they're outside. The 4th panel shows them walking as a thought begins, but we get a closer zoom on Miwa's crush with no background at all as she continues her response about what's next for her when Miwa leaves and acknowledging the time they set out to be together will end, which is the real important part after Miwa tries to breeze by how she feels about leaving.

I'm kind of skipping over some important interactions that lead us here but this final panel as full page to really solidify Miwa's confession does something neat too. We just had a side by side 2 panel page right before this with the characters faces as the confession happens, and this page is to really focus on Miwa delivering the confession. The author gave us a shot of her face right before this but now the weight is all in the words she closes out with. I think the decision to fade out the image and place the text in isolation functions almost as 2 separate panels, giving more weight to Miwa's words as we see them without visual information to distract us from her message. Quite fitting as a way to focus on something that no amount of body language could convey more than the direct words that someone struggles to form to get someone to understand what's in their heart and mind.

To focus more on how panels can be used as more than just "size = emphasis", I want to look at this other manga I've been loving a lot right now called Hirayasumi. It's about a young man without much future prospects after dropping a minor acting career inheriting the house of a lonely elderly woman he befriended before she passed on, and his younger cousin coming to live with him as she starts her first year at an art college. It's a bit funny, sad, and has lots of poignant self reflective moments that's really enjoyable to read. It also has this very slow burn romance between the main guy, Hiroto, and a girl he bumps into, Yomogi, which he leaves a terrible first impression with. They really don't set you up to think she's going to be a love interest until several more interactions later that I thought was really cool and different! In fact, the author is trying to actively make it a bit nebulous on how they might even get to that level of familiarity and love which is something worth studying. Here's that initial moment just for fun:

What I wanted to focus on with this story is how the author has different ways of using panels to play with time in a way that most other manga just don't branch out into. It's just an extra rare spice to deepen the flavor of a dish that most people are ok with just using salt and pepper, if that makes sense.

These pages I'm going to use are all out of order which I hope you don't mind, There's just a few examples of each thing here that I think will be clearer in the order I want to show them.

There's this really cool thing I haven't seen done anywhere else where the actual shape of the panel itself indicates if something is set in the past or the present, but more specifically if the past is being recalled by someone in the present, not a typical flashback chapter (which most manga do with a black border). The past memories are represented with rounded edges that allow for really smooth transitions between moments in time that I thought was so cool when I noticed it. It's really effective when the transition happens on the same page and signals to you so effortlessly that something is different about this moment.

This next thing is something that is more style over additional function, as it technically can still read without being used but when it's there it does add additional clarity. When we think of comic gutters, we think of them as the passage of time between moments. There's a general set negative space between panels that is set by each author as their standard and when something is an augmented amount of time passing than rather than real time, we see frequent use of widening the borders between panels or rows (which is even used in some of the How Do We Relationship? pages above). If someone told you this in isolation then it doesn't seem hard to start thinking about, "but what if you did the opposite?" 

Hirayasumi uses this both as a tool to connect the beats of two panels as a way to say that these two moments basically are meant to function as one statement but took two panels to show all the information needed, such as the first solid line break on panels 2 and 3. The whole bottom half of this same page uses them to connect several moments in time over a long period of time too, mostly in that same way to say that even though this is sort of a time lapse, this is meant to be taken as one thought or idea, "stuff" is happening but all you need to take away is that it happens for a while.

When you let yourself play with removing gutters from panels, it also makes it natural to do nested or overlapping panels as well, like most American comics do. These have the more traditional role of functioning as a different method of emphasis, cutting off the moments behind them or reacting to the moment they're placed within. It's not especially groundbreaking, but mixing these styles together allows for a lot of freedom to represent things in more interesting ways.

This moment pretty early on uses basically all of these ideas in a creative page that doesn't distract us with crazy visuals, the rules he set up with his layouts all come together to say specific things and it's SO smart. Hiroto's cousin Natsumi gets drunk at a party and can't get home and needs Hiroto to help her, having to tell her what transpired to get her to where she is right now. It's a recollection of so many small events that just need to tell us "this happened" as one unit, and we get Natsumi's face overlapping in a way to make it clear that this is her in the moment trying to explain herself over the phone.  It's also rounded on the edges as an event that passed already as well as look like a speech bubble with a little tail pointing to her mouth at the bottom. You don't need to overload your pages with moments so minutely crafted as this one but each time they show up they really stick with you.

If you make comics, I hope this gives you something new to think about! I wanted to write this stuff down to hopefully internalize it and help me plan my pages better when I get back to working on new stuff. I've also been trying to pay attention to composition and filling space within panels as well as trying to nest my speech bubbles to fill in corners and things like that, trying my best to get a more manga look than I've gotten before. That's all for now, read those manga and tell me if you like them because theyre some of my favorites right now!