Okay so. My dear sweet graphic novel illustrators. Consider the following:
Using handwriting to convey voice and voice change. Each character speaking in different handwriting to show the differences in their voice. The coward talking in chicken scratch, the sweetheart talking in cursive, the hard ass talking all in caps. The faster a character talks, the sloppier the writing gets. They more quiet and reserved, the smaller. When characters overhear others talking, make the text small and almost illegible, so the reader has to strain just as much to read it as the character does to hear it.
The entire comic in black and white except for key, key details that are related. Subtlety is key here. A murder mystery where, just barely in shot, in the background, so small you can hardly see it, there’s a frying pan on the wall in red. The murder victim’s entire body is red. A love note where certain words are random colours,representing emotion. A love story about long lost lovers where the main character sees a pink bird out of the corner of her eye that eventually leads her to her love interest, dressed in pink.
Moments of depression or emptiness leaving the characters unfinished, in a literal way. I’m not just talking sketchy lines, I mean guidelines, the circle for the base of the head, cross hatching, eraser marks, mistakes crossed out.
This one really only works for printed stuff but. A comedy where the characters interact with the medium. Pushing their head through a wall on one page, having their head stick out of the wall on the other page. A mystery where you need to fold two pages together to reveal a puzzle.
Characters talking using ONLY speech bubbles and art. Aliens who communicate in static of varying colours, their speech bubbles square and the colours representing their emotion. When they’re scared, it’s a TV signal (the colour line thingies). When they’re zoned out, it’s grey TV static. When their angry, it’s black. Dream creatures, telepaths, Gods, fantasy races, all using abstract concepts to convey meaning.
Ya don’t need to animate it to be cool, bro.
