My seven self-appointed rules of drawing comics (Patreon)

Working on both Foxes and the bigger, more complicated comic, I've made myself some rules about what I can and can't, should or shouldn't do. While the two of them are vastly different from each other - Foxes in Love being an indefinite collection of four-panel strips made entirely digitally in an extremely simplistic style, and A Friend of Caesar tells a full and complete story in a graphic novel drawn with ink - the same rules tend to apply, and I thought I'd share them here:

1. No pages with only talking. If all the characters are doing is talk, they should be doing something while having this conversation. If that is not possible, there should be something happening in the background - even if it's just a faceless background character spilling a glass of water and cleaning it up. In Foxes in Love, I still try to give comics that are only conversation some kind of an activity, even just walking somewhere instead of sitting and talking.
2. The illustrations should be clear and obvious, enough that even a person who can't read the text would have some kind of a grasp of what's going on, and how the characters feel about it. In Foxes in Love, the activity or theme of the comic should be clear in the first panel, unless the punchline is a revelation of what the foxes are actually up to.
3. Excemptions are allowed when it's comical. Every character who is speaking in this panel should be in this panel, unless it's explicitly funny that they are not. Once there's an established pattern to the 'language' of the comic, readers will subconsciously look for it, and it's an unexpected punchline when a rule is broken deliberately.
4. Each character's design must be distinct from each other. It's absolutely vital that the characters can't be confused with each other from any angle or distance. This is one of the thing that's far easier with Foxes in Love, as the characters are literally colour-coded, but while drawing Caesar, I've come to realise how much more I'd be in trouble if I had opted to draw human characters instead of furries - when almost everyone is a different animal, it's far easier to make two badgers look different from each other.
5. Body language is just as important as facial expressions. Make the characters' body language clear enough that a reader could tell how they are feeling even if their face isn't visible. The word 'cartoonish' means exaggerated or caricatured for a reason, the characters' gestures don't need to be realistic, they need to be clear.
6. The characters must be fitted the dialogue, never the other way around. They should be positioned in order of who speaks first, no matter how strange of an angle that will require. A character whose speech bubble is on the left should be on the left of a character who says something on the right.
7. Quality is measured in consistency, distinction and clarity. As long as a reader can tell who the characters are, where they are and what they are doing, it's a good panel. A comic consisting of extremely well-drawn individual panels, but where locations and characters aren't recognisable on sight, or are hard to tell apart from each other, is worse than one drawn with stick figures.

In the end, it mostly boils down to consistency, clarity, motion and emotion. As long as each individual panel meets those standards, it's good enough. Anything above and beyond that is a bonus, not a requirement. While I do my best to also draw well, remembering this has taken away a lot of pressure from me.