#panel framing

[storypraxis]

Look at those gorgeous panel frames! The closest we get nowadays was Liam Sharp’s The Brave and the Bold: Batman and Wonder Woman.

[prismpub]

Sunroc Building Materials awarded Wood Innovation Grant from United States Forest Service

Sunroc Building Materials awarded Wood Innovation Grant from United States Forest Service

Sunroc Building Materials – a leader in building supplies and services in Utah and Idaho –announced it is the recipient of a Wood Innovation Grant from the United States Forest Service. The $250,000 grant has been awarded for the creation and production of wall and floor panels to be used in single family and midrise multi-family home construction. Photo: Jared Campbell, Clyde Companies Unlike…

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[learningtocomic]

Dialogue

Two weeks ago I decided to talk about dialogue at comics club!  :)  Some of this stuff was taken from previous posts about dialogue, but some of it is new.  Anyway, here’s the PPT:

The way that this often plays out for me, is that if I do panel composition without leaving space for the dialogue, the panel itself is going to look GREAT, but then I rip my hair out trying to fit in the dialogue later.  On the other hand, if I leave space for the dialogue, the panel composition is going to feel REALLY WONKY, *until* I fill in the dialogue later.

Anyway, there’s so many different ways to visually convey the tone of dialogue -- speech bubble size, fonts, etc.  Then there’s the whole “caption = internal monologue” thing that superhero comics like to do -- they even go so far as to color it differently depending on who’s thinking.

One big problem that I struggle with is speech bubble clutter -- sometimes there’s just too much I want to say with words, and I end up creating “traffic jams” -- where you don’t know where to read first and where to look first.  :-/  This is in part bad visual design -- the issue of leaving enough space in the panel for the words to flow properly.  (In the example below on the left, the placement of the people in the 2nd panel sort of forces the bubbles into a weird flow.  In the example on the right, the super artsy circle stuff on the right makes it really hard to track who is speaking what when.)

But part of it is also dialogue writing, because...

Thankfully, this is one of those things where writing advice books can be helpful in honing character voice, dialogue flow, etc.  Of course, with the caveat that ....

So often I find myself doing A LOT of tweaking -- getting the right word order so that the lines break into the right bubble shapes, picking the right font and font size...  (the ideal font for me is legible but dense, without very tall T’s or long y’s that poke out too much -- I like using lower case, and many comic fonts are designed to be upper-case only).   And as far as font size goes -- you can see on the left, the Ms. Marvel page is designed for print first, so the font size is much smaller -- maybe 12 or 14 pt.  Whereas Gunnerkrigg Court, which is designed for web first, has a larger font (18 pt?).  I know that Erfworld actually completely resizes all of its speech bubbles before going to print, which sounds like a super hard thing to do!

And after all that tweaking, I might step back and realize that all that optimization has completely killed the personality and voice of my character -- everyone starts sounding the same.  It’s like the Same Nose Syndrome when drawing. Unfortunately, I think the solution to some of this has to happen earlier in the process -- the panel layout stage.  Quiet people need more panels for silent emoting, loud people need more dialogue bubble space, etc.  Sometimes setting establishment is better done via art (those expansive background shots), but if you didn’t plan for it, then you’re stuck trying to slip it in via dialogue or captions.

So when I reach this point in the dialogue tweaking process, it’s a good time to take in the big picture and ask myself --

I picked 2 random dialogue pages, 5 panels each.  But I think you can tell that the page on the right was probably written dialogue-first, with the panel layout / art direction written in later. 

I’m not trying to say that it’s always better to have the one or the other take the lead on any given page -- just that it’s something to examine as you move through the story.  Sometimes I have all this dialogue planned, and then when I step back, I end up scrapping all of the dialogue and letting the art tell the story.  Sometimes it’s the other way around -- the panels just aren’t providing the story nuance that I want, so then I use the dialogue to carry more of the weight.

In either case, it’s really important to be able to get the words and the art to flow and match each other.  And thus --

And this brings in the whole workflow problem.  I’m trying to learn to do everything in Manga Studio so that I can tweak everything at every stage, because when I draft layout I do it *extremely* loosely.  But I also know people who have everything locked in at a detailed pencil stage, so then inking and rendering and text can be done anywhere convenient.

The last point though...  Sometimes I’d spend hours agonizing over some dialogue phrasing, and then I’d show two versions to a friend and they wouldn’t even notice the difference! It’s because comics are often so spaced out that the whole page just passes in 20 seconds, if that.   I guess that’s a ... relief?  (Or depressing as all heck)

[learningtocomic]

Panel Layout

Jing from comics club decided to talk about panel layout!  :)  Panel layout is a big topic, so we actually have other posts already in the panel framing (stuff inside the panels) and panel flow (flow between panels) tags.

For the content inside each panel -- there’s always the classic Scott McCloud stuff.

Here’s two examples from Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which keeps the panels itself static and just changes what’s inside.

I really like how he uses color and the static frames of the building to force you to notice what’s different, while keeping it a muted sort of horror.

When you get into composition of a page, Chris Ware does some interesting things with using panel shapes to accentuate the movement and structure of a house, in Building Stories below:

And here, in weaving and intersecting different stories

But things are very different in manga, where panel size and shape is used to control pacing, and not story structure.   The following is from DeathNote, where Light first meets L.  The first page starts pretty straight-forward, with a setting panel, and some mid-range shots...

And now in the page below we have a ramping up of tension using an ever increasing series of close-ups.

Notice that it’s okay to repeat the same shot -- we see Light’s eyes looking back 4 times, each time closer, but the same angle.  It doesn’t seem boring because it’s interspersed with gradually revealed shots of L, and this build-up leads to a page turn and a two-page wide panel...

... where the whole scene suddenly opens up from the zoom-in tension before, and there is a great horizontal sight-line between L and Light.  Notice how the entire panel’s perspective is tilted to make the sight-line work.

This next example is from Slam Dunk, where roughly 10 seconds of a basketball game is spread out over 12 pages.

Here we start with a dramatic character moment where two rivals decide to actually work together, with him choosing the pass the ball...

A bunch of angled close-up shots here draws out the character tension, that lead to a full-page vertical action shot...

Followed by brief tense reaction shots

The character moment over, we have a few pages where the panels, instead of drawing out character tension, is used to tighten a tense action sequence as he actually goes for the basket. The panels alternate between medium, wide, medium, close, then wide shot for the final basket...

The vertical panels here accentuate the jump.

Then comes a series of silent audience reaction panels where time actually stops, giving the in-universe audience and the reader time to catch their breath...

assess the situation ...

Until finally we have the cathartic cheering.  The artist uses panels to show lots of different tension -- character tension with close-ups, action tension through a quick interchange of medium/wide shots, and story tension by stopping time altogether before the big reveal.  

The next example is from Attack on Titan, where we see/experience the same explosion by intercutting between two different locations:

First, there is a two-page wide shot

followed immediately by a close-up from right next to the explosion, going vertically down the page

As well as what they’re seeing from that proximity.  And strewn throughout the panels is the オ (o) sound of the explosion, tying everything together.

That オ sound brings us back to the far shot, which is also appropriate because that’s when the shockwave reaches them

And then finally, a page where you see both locations and both reactions.

The last example is from a webcomic, where the artist decided to redraw her manga chapters from several years earlier.  On the left is the original, and on the right is the new layout: (read from left to right)

Notice how the wide shot in the middle of the new version does a much better job of setting up the characters’ physical relationship to each other.

And here, the two original panels of the page were condensed into the top half, which leaves the audience with a much more intriguing page turn.  The artist has also grown more confident with different angled shots.

[learningtocomic]

Figuring out Dialogue

Comics dialogue is really hard for me, and definitely something that I’ve been trying to work on.  Part of the challenge of comics dialogue is its visual aspect -- words take up physical space and interact with the panel image in ways that don’t happen in fiction.  Line breaks and balloon size restrictions make certain turns of phrase not work.  On the other hand, awkward pauses can happen easily just by breaking a big balloon into smaller balloons.  I spend probably a third of the comics page drawing process just futzing with the dialogue. 

I wanted to look at a recent fan comic page that I did, as a way to analyze my current process.  Here’s a process gif.  I’ll break it down after the cut.

In doing the layout for this page, I knew that (1) there were some panels that I wanted to move around, and (2) I was quite unhappy with the feeling and direction of the second half of the page, but looking at the layout, I knew there really wasn’t any need for an additional page, and that the general panel flow felt right.  Which meant fixing the “bad feeling” had to come from the dialogue.

After doing the inks, I then locked down the dialogue that “felt right.”  At this stage, I’ve often found it useful to ask myself if a certain line of dialogue would work better for a different panel.  In this case, Steve’s affirmation of “April 4th” worked much better a panel earlier.  

I think this happens because when I’m doing the rough layout, I put words that match the general feeling of the panel, without that much consideration of *when* the words happen -- before, during, or after seeing the emotion/action of the panel.  And if the words happen before, it oftentimes works better to just move the words to the bottom of the previous panel, so that you see the dialogue response before seeing the visual response. 

Anyways, by moving “April 4th” up, I now have 3 panels to fix the ending.   Looking at the emotional turns of the panels, it seems to be: (1) Steve says something funny that transitions the topic, (2) Steve makes the invite, (3) Bucky expresses his pleasure.  My original dialogue ended with Bucky asking a question, which doesn’t feel properly conclusive.  So anyway, I jotted down some updated dialogue.

After jotting down the temporary dialogue, I then looked at my panel artwork, and noticed that I needed to move/resize the artwork in the 4th and 5th panel to make space for the dialogue.  On the other hand, I also needed a bit more dialogue in the 2nd panel to fill in space there.   Cue more image tweaking and dialogue tweaking to reach the final version:

Some notes of the final tweaks:

I decided that bringing in Bucky’s guilt about almost-killing Steve was bringing in an unnecessary tangent.  So I went the more lighthearted logistics guilt of Bucky being sorry he didn’t express his desires earlier.

I changed great to perfect, because great is more about Steve’s opinion about the date, whereas perfect is more about Steve’s opinion about Bucky’s choice, regardless of the date.

I spent SO LONG on this line.  I wanted something about Tony and his present and the extra month, but everything I wrote was 3 lines long, and I wanted something 2 lines long.  I’m still not happy with it, but it does the job.

Decided to go more generic avengers instead of a more Cap movie reference.

For this I just stared at Bucky’s face for a while and tried to figure out what he would say that would match and enhance his happy expression.

So, overall, I like how the majority of this turned out.  After this is when I’d do the shading.  This is slightly different from my Tisquantum process, where I ink and do shading FIRST, and do ALL the dialogue tweaks after the artwork is completely locked down.  That doesn’t work as well as what I do here, because here I get to adjust the size and positioning of the lineart as I’m tweaking the lineart, so there’s more of a give-and-take process.  Unfortunately my Tisquantum workflow doesn’t currently allow for that.  :(

[learningtocomic]

Figuring out multiple ways to capture a single mood

So everyone's seen Wally Wood's "22 Panels that Always Work", which is his personal reference of panel layouts of "what to do when you have to show 2 people talking". 

Lately I've been thinking that I should start compiling a visual reference cheat-sheet of different ways to capture a single mood.  There are plenty of references for drawing feet or hats or hands, or even character design.  But I don't come across many that are the level of conveying mood as part of a larger page.  I like drawing faces, so it's often too easy for me to just draw panel after panel of close-ups, but when I stop to think about it, there are actually lots of ways to capture the emotion or the tone.  For example, if I were to convey the idea of "loneliness," my first instinct might be to default to a close-up facial expression:

But in fact I can present a more nuanced idea of loneliness through body language -- is the person huddled and afraid?  Or resigned with slack shoulders?  Or sad while trudging?

While we're at it, I can also add to the sense of loneliness using the panel framing -- adjusting camera angle through which the reader sees the scene.  Loneliness is particularly easy: just pull the camera back, distancing the character from the audience.

If I have room for fiddling with panels, I can even do some thematically appropriate aspect-to-aspect thing where I show some different shots of the space the person is walking through. 

I can also think about the other things in the panel -- maybe express loneliness through the person's relationship/interaction with other people, or with objects in the environment.

I can add a quick "umph" by mixing up my rendering techniques -- highlighting the emotion through color and contrast, or by adding manga-style background lines that indicate mood.

I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list, but when I'm stuck with a particular layout, I think it's helpful to step back and ask myself -- are there better ways to express this emotion?  And as you can see, chances are I'm going to end up doing a mix-and-match of many techniques, depending on the larger context of the story and the more immediate flow of the page. 

Of course, loneliness is pretty easy -- what about "mild irritation?"  How do I express joy through panel framing?  And given how bad I am at action sequences, I should really have a cheat sheet for different ways to pump adrenaline into a scene.

Anyway, I think it might be fun to start doing these sorts of comic-specific reference guides, so I'm going to add a new tag of "cheat sheet."  Feel free to add your own!  :D

[learningtocomic]

Process/Thoughts from drawing a CA:tWS fan comic

So in addition to Tisquantum, I've been drawing a lot of Captain America fan comics.  I've been learning a lot in the process.  I've already talked a little about framing devices with regards to the Steve vs. Technology comic, but I'm quite a process voyeur/exhibitionist, so here's some "behind the scenes" on the Soup Line comic.

Avoiding Mood Whiplash.

I wanted Steve to poke at Bucky's facade a bit in page 4, but I had a really hard time figuring out how he should react, and the "punch" for this page was going to be.  Here's a draft that I discarded: 

As you can see, I was pretty clear on what I wanted to happen: Steve being snarky, Bucky being pissed/defensive, ???, Bucky accepting it. But it didn't seem to work.  I stared at this for a long time, but then realized I was trying to cram too much into one page -- there's mood whiplash for Bucky. By dividing it into 2 pages, it worked a lot better: one page of Steve poking and Bucky getting mad, and then another page for the resolution.

Another case of mood whiplash I caught much later in the inking/shading process.  Here's the draft page (ignore the speech bubbles -- they're from the updated version):

I realized that going from "Bucky casually sticking by Steve and pretending he's just doing it because he has nothing better to do", to "Bucky revealing how he's actually concerned about Steve", and then back to "Bucky in his class clown persona" was too jarring.  So I had to change Bucky's face in the 2nd panel, and with it, significantly change the text.

I also needed to find a different way to show Bucky's concern.  I think that was the hardest thing for me in this comic, and something that I didn't do very successfully -- I feel like so much has to be inferred, and I have a hard time figuring out how to let the audience figure it out.  I'm very unhappy with page 5, because it's about Steve giving up his facade of anger and Bucky giving up his facade of "who gives a shit," but it is what it is.

Showing Character relationships through action

So when Bucky shows up on the first page, I'd originally planned a standard Mystery Character entrance: 1 panel w/o the character, then same shot but with the new character in the foreground (outlined in blue for your viewing pleasure). 

But when I got to drawing, I realized I wanted Bucky's entrance to mean more -- instead of waiting to show his relationship with Steve through words or a series of Meaningful Reaction Glances, I did this instead:

Even without the words, we can immediately see their relationship: Bucky taller, casual, carefree, snarky, the older brother figure.  Steve surprised but not startled, working on his own frustration issues.  It also pulls us in closer to the main characters.

This also lead to the ending hair ruffle -- this time, with their issues reconciled, they're doing the casual banter without the tension.

The original panel I'd planned there was this:

I'd been trying to break up the monotony of talking heads with a wider shot, and I figured Bucky slapping Steve on the back would be pretty appropriate.  Plus this is Bucky back to his jokester schtick, so seeing that through the reflection would have been consistent with the other pages.  But that character interaction doesn't work with that layout, and seemed... superficial for that moment.  So instead: a visual callback.