How to Lay Out a Comic Page

1. How to lay out a comic page intro: Hey, there, and welcome to my class, How To Layout A Comic Page. In this class, we'll be focusing on a fundamental approach to designing comic panels and pages to help you tell your story with this little obstruction as possible. Along the way, we'll try a variety of exercises culminating in a class project that will remove your uncertainty about the page layout process. But first, a bit about me. My name is CJ and I'm an animator, illustrator, and designer. I taught digital media and art in the classroom for about three years before transitioning to technology and art full-time. I've seen myself and my students struggle with some fundamental elements of sequential art that just aren't as well covered as some of the more popular elements like anatomy or perspective. Page Layout is a completely different skillset from designing characters or drawing action on the page, and because it's less exciting, people tend to forget about it until they're actually ready to start drawing their story. Unfortunately, this is where they get stuck and they can't decide how to design the narrative on the page, so their story never gets finished. If you're struggling with this aspect of the comic creation process, I hope you'll join me as I show you a dead-simple approach to laying out comics that focuses on panel flow, panel size variation, panel sheet variation, and using page layout to best tell your story. I'm so excited to have you here with me, and I can't wait to show you how to layout a comic page. 2. Class Project: Now that we've covered a brief description of what this class is going to be about, I want to tell you what the class project for this will be, and it's very simple. Once we've covered all of the lessons, I want you to focus on creating three to five different comic book pages with different panel layouts. I don't want you to put any artwork in those panels. I don't want you to put anything other than the panels on the page. That might seem strange at first, but you will start to see as I go through the lessons, how even just the shapes and the sizes of the panels can make your eye move across the page differently depending on how you choose to lay it out. Which is the entire point of this lesson. It's a different skill set than drawing your panels themselves. It's really important that we hone in on that specific thing. Once we've finished all of these lessons, and feel free to review any of them at anytime, I want you to go ahead and paper, pencil on your digital tablet, your program of choice, lay out three to five different comic book pages and see how those panels, from everything that you've learned in this class will change how the story reads without any artwork present. I think it's a really great way to test your knowledge and see how well your understanding of the foundation. Once you've done that, start putting art work in it, and see how much further you can take it. All right, let's hop into the lessons. 3. Comic Formats: So briefly before we get too deep into things, I want to talk about the different formats that your comic can come in and this is going to impact how you might lay out your pages, the page size that you're working with. These are just things that you might be aware of to some degree, but it's good to know going in. So there are four main formats for comics that I want to cover right now, and that's the humorous comic strip, which is what you might see in a standalone or perhaps in a newspaper. Now those have also been updated for social media to be a little bit different look, which I'll go into, and then just standard newspaper comics. They do not all come in strips. Some have a little bit more space to work with when they are a little bit more popular and then the comic book page, which is what most people think of when they think of comics and then web comic formats, things like Webtoon and more infinite scroll feeds that will also impact how you lay out your comic book page. Now, each format has its own nuances, but they all perform the same basic functions. Comic strips are as simple as the title suggests, one linear strip of boxes. Comic books are obviously more complex as the page allows for more variation and narratives to continue between the pages. So let's go ahead and take a look from the start at more of a humorist comic strip style and I've chosen Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson because it is largely recognized as one of the greats. It's one of my personal favorites and it's just very simple. We have four very simple panels right here and then it's just a basic story. We have two shots, we have two characters and then we cut in for one character for the main punchline of the joke, or the buildup to the joke and then the payoff right here. With that, we have these four panels and it's really quite simple. Basically equal sizes. Don't mind the different sizes that I'm doing for the boxes right there. So that's the main or I guess traditional style, and then we can look at something like Sarah Scribbles. Sarah Andersen is an internet comic artist and I think she's really fantastic at getting a lot of emotion and a lot of punch from her jokes and her comics. here we have the same style with four equal boxes to tell the story. Sometimes she'll use five or six and that's very common in humorous comic strips as well to maybe do more than four. But we have them in more of a square alignment and the reason that we do that is things like Instagram much prefer this square image format rather than the long strip across the screen, right? Just a lot easier to house everything on one screen on your cell phone as you're scrolling up and down, but it's still the same. We've got four boxes and in this instance we have one character throughout the whole thing as we build up to the punchline at the end, but still very similar execution that you should be aware of. Then we get to something like Calvin and Hobbes in some of the larger strips, especially as it got more popular. We have an entire large rectangle that we're working in. It's not quite a letter size page. As you can see that I have an A4 size on my canvas right now. But it's pretty simple, right? You've just got a number of squares to fill out this rectangle and as we'll get into a little bit later, it does abide by shape or size variation on your panels and you can see the different panels that he goes for. There's a rhythm to these that he's building. We've got these more vertical rectangles right here that move faster, this one panoramic shot, and then we build back up into two medium panels that we can sit with at the end. We get to the classic comic book page. This is a page from Mike Mignola's Hellboy and it's pretty straightforward as well. I've got it pretty much lined up to my A4 paper, and just this one big rectangle right here and everything fits within there. Now, Mignola does pretty much everything in square panels and I think that's probably best to start out with if you are really trying to get your feet under you in terms of really laying out your pages in a comfortable way. But you can see similar thing applies to Bill Watterson even though they're very different tones. We've got one large panel to set the stage, some smaller, more vertical panels, and one that's almost a perfect square as we cut it on some details and this just really builds the flow of the page. We'll take a look at this again when we're looking at the comic flow. But really just for now, just understanding that this is a comic book page, they're meant to be read up and down, left to right and that's the general format that we're used to. Now, when we get to Webtoons, it does get a little bit different. We have something that is meant to be on your phone, so this might fit within your phone screen right here. This might fit within your phone screen, this might fit with your phone screen. So we can see it's going to be about the same phone screen each time, so it does cut at some strange places, but we're really going to have to fit maybe single panels at a time and you'll see other panels peeking through like this or like this and that's just the nature of reading on a primarily vertical device. But it is a very different way. You can see that we're not dealing with the same flow from left to right as much. We're really more focused on downward momentum and that is probably the primary difference. We're really focusing more on one or two panels at a time. But that's pretty different. I would focus more on the more traditional ones first to get a good foundation under you and then start to move to other things from there. Now, I would recommend that you really try to find one example of each of these formats that you enjoy and read and then look over it a few times. Get a feel for how those panels are laid out and how they move from one to the next and how your eyes move across the page and that will really help you start to digest storytellers that you like and figure out how to reverse engineer the storytelling that they choose when they're putting their stories together. Cool, let's pop right into linear comic flow. 4. Linear Panel Flow: Welcome back to linear comic flow. So in the last lesson, we looked at comic formats, the humerus comic strip, newspaper comics, comic book pages, and webcomics, and all of those are helpful to know because you've got to decide on the format and the medium that you're going to be working in for your comic, so that you can lay out your pages to match. But there is something that is common between all of these and that's linear comic flow, and that's how one panel moves to the next. Then western comics we read from left to right, this is the most basic principle that you need to follow when you're laying out your pages, but it does get more difficult to maintain as your pages grow more complex. So to start out with, we'll look at the Calvin and Hobbes that we did first. The linear comic flow here is very simple, we are just moving from one side of the page to the next, left to right, all of the speech bubbles are up here. So we know where to look where reading the same thing, all of the pictures are down below, very easy. Instead of scribbles, we have something with very minimal dialogue. But in this, we get our first taste of the vertical navigation of the page, so we go from left to right, and then we go diagonally down. So whenever we're going down, it's like a typewriter, we are resetting down at the left-hand side of the page, so that we can read to the right again. So it's this Z pattern all the way down, and if she had more panels, we would continue more or less this pattern on down the page. Then, let's look at the more sophisticated Calvin and Hobbes comic, which has three lines to it. We have one big panel to start out with, with the title, and that sets up our story, very simply, move from left to right. Now on this one, as you might have guessed, we're following the Z or coming down here, and then very simply right across the page. Now, all of his panels have a similar vertical alignment. So for each row, it follows this grid right here, which is in future lessons, I'll really recommend that you stick with that to start with, that vertical grid, and horizontal grid are really going to help you remove decisions from your workflow, so that you can focus on just getting your pages together, and start figuring out if your story works, and then you don't alter it unless you need to. But for this, very simply, left to right, we're following the Z, and again, [inaudible] does a great job keeping all of his text up at the top of each panel, so that we can keep track of where people should be saying things, where we should be reading, and where we need to look for the visual accompaniment. Now with Hellboy, we do have a little bit of difference. Whereas in Calvin and Hobbes, we have one singular, vertical length. We did have some variation here, so instead of going from left to right, we are doing left, right, down, and then we're coming over here, we're moving across to the right, and we're coming back down right here. This is tricky, this is hard to do. We're actually going down here first, then over, then over. Because think about the inverse, if we were to go down to here, and then over, then back and over, we would have to traverse this frame twice, this panel twice. So you do need to think about that. That is very difficult to pull off, and [inaudible] very skilled at his page layouts and his designs. I think it's very difficult to have two panels vertically on the left-hand side of your page because it will make whatever comes next a little bit harder to determine how you're going to get there. Now, great comic artists do this with some more advanced methods, like using our composition to point in the direction that they would like for the reader to go next using speech bubbles or sound effects. But all we're worried about right now is making sure panels leak clearly from one to the next. So we would not try and do this. We would just try and go from left to right and down and not worrying about having two vertical panels before we go to the right. The web tune much the same. Now, this is interesting. So this panel is the one that is furthest on the right, but this panel is above it. We actually, they do something very clever here, which is they have the dialogue, and so that helps us move left to right, and then come back down here, come down here. Great, come right down, come down, and look at the vertical offset where different heights help us know where to go next. A little bit different and you're scrolling vertically through this page, it does display itself a little bit differently, but this is the fundamental concept that you want to get under your fingers, so that you can understand how your pages need to be laid out. Well, let's go ahead and hop right into panel size variation. 5. Panel Size Variation: Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for joining me again. Right now we're going to hop right into panel size variation. We did just cover comic formats and linear comic flow. Both ways to look at how comic artists use their medium and their format to help the reader follow along the page and read the story in the order that they intended. There are a couple of different ways to do this and make your story interesting. The ones that I'm going to talk about right now are the grid system. I'm going to talk about small panels, large panels, and then splash pages. That was a terrible S, ignore me. Let's go ahead and start by laying a big rectangle on our page. I'm not being too precise, but this represents the print-safe area on your page. There's always going to be a little bit of room left for bleed so that the printer can safely cut off certain areas of the image so that the printer doesn't just run out of paper. If you're doing this purely digitally, you can get a little bit more creative with it. But I digress. Suffice to say the most simple way to conceive of your comic page is to lay it out in a grid. We want to have basically equally sized rectangles, maybe a little bit bigger than that. Then we'll do it this and maybe we'll do it with fours. We want to just try and have something that is more or less equally sized panels divided across the page where each row is read in succession. We saw this with the Calvin and Hobbes comic. With this, we are just moving down like that and across. This is the only motion that the reader's eye has to worry about, is this Z pattern. That's great. That's really helpful for us. It helps us understand where I should be at all times, and we don't have to do anything too crazy in order to make sure that the reader reads the panels in the right order. Right now, I have just done something that is a three across and four down. You can also do maybe just three and three. We'll have a little bit taller panels. That works better if you want to have something like four figures. It's just a little bit easier if that's how you want to lay out your page, or we could even do something like four and four, which, I think, is a little bit harder to make work. I'm just eyeballing here. You can definitely get more precise with how you want these to look in terms of the spacing. But again, the really important thing here is trying to focus on getting a grid. Maybe make that a little bit bigger. A little bit uneven, but you can worry about your exact spacing when you're actually laying out your page. This is a four on four. This is a busy comic book page. I would definitely be careful trying to make a page exactly like this because it is going to be, it's just a lot to take in. That's a very hectic page for a reader to look at and it might make them a little bit anxious subconsciously. But regardless, we are going to take a look at this. In terms of our page right here, we do have some variation that we can look at, so we can come in and as we saw with the Hellboy page, we can have very small panels. We can have some that are vertically taller, that are small, and have some that are more horizontally oriented but still small. All that is to say that there are multiple ways to get small details. This is perfect if perhaps, let's say we want to have a small panel somewhere on our page. What we want is we just want to show a letter that someone left on a counter. This is perfect. This is what we might call in film language an insert shot. We just want to see this one letter, or perhaps we have something that's more like a hand. It's a good way to show that maybe someone's reaching for something or something like that. That is really where the small panel excels. Now, what we can also do is we can create these very large panels, which we also saw in the Hellboy comic and in the Calvin and Hobbes comic. Now, this is great. Well, we want to have something maybe a little bit more complex. Like a close up of a face, and we really need to see an expression on someone's face. That would be very helpful for that, or we want to see a little bit more action in a shot, so we can definitely see something like somebody. You've got this guy winding up for a punch. It might be oriented a little bit differently, but it definitely helps to have these large panels for action shots. Then we can similarly have something where we have just a portrait that is a little bit taller so that we can get the full figure in frame rate. Get our Hellboy stand-in, and there we go. Something like that. That is the essence of the small versus large panel debate internally in your head, deciding what the reader needs to see and know at that moment, and then figuring out what exactly the best way to show that is. Is it with a small panel that will focus on the detail, or is it with a large panel that will call a lot of attention to it? Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that small panels will make your page read faster. If we go back to this, if we're looking at these panels, we're going to zoom through these panels. We're just going to go right through them. Whereas, if we have a number of larger panels, we're going to take a little bit more time to work through these big panels and study all of the detail that they have. So we've got all this detail in here and someone looking at someone and being very dramatic. All that is to say with large panels, we're going to spend more time consuming the detail of the page. With small panels, we're going to move more quickly through it so you can really control the pacing of your comic by doing that. Now, the final thing that we can look at is the splash page. The splash page is used sparingly. The splash page is really meant to have just the whole page taken up with one image. If we've got a character reveal, and he's looking super cool, let's say it's a guy with long hair, and he's got a trench coat and sitting there in the wind and it's blowing dramatically. This is obviously, maybe a little bit ridiculous, but the point is, it's very dramatic, and we can see exactly what the author intends. We can see that it's intended for this character to have a large amount of importance placed on them and that we're intended to pay attention to what they're doing. What I would like you to do is to start practicing by creating a page with either two or three panels per row and three or four panels per page. Examine how these subdivisions make the page feel. Does your eye move faster through the page with more panels or less panels? Now draw another page, if you went for more smaller panels in the first attempt, try fewer, larger panels this time around and examine how this new page reads and how your eye tracks from one panel to the next. Once you try this a couple of times, I really think that you'll start to get a feel, and don't draw anything in these panels. But you'll really start to get a feel for exactly what you should be looking for when you're trying to create a mood or a speed, or anything inside of your panel. This is getting messy now, but you get the point. Go ahead and try it multiple times without any art in your panels so that you can really get an idea for how it's going to feel on the page. We'll see you next time with panel shape variation. 6. Panel Shape Variation: Thanks for joining me again guys. Last time we covered panel size variation in some amount of detail. There was a lot to go over. This time we're going to talk about panel shape variation. Admittedly, I don't use this very often, so I'm not going to cover deeply. I think you can see pretty clearly that there are plenty of comic creators that never vary their shape outside of squares and rectangles, so you can absolutely create incredibly effective comics without breaking that rule or that shape. There are comic creators that do vary their panel shapes to great success, so it is important just to be aware that it's a possibility. You might have guessed from the name of this lesson, panels don't have to be limited to rectangles. You can use triangles or you can use circles or you can use pentagons if you want to, it doesn't really matter. You can use any shape that you want to tell the story, if that helps keep it visually interesting or keep your reader engaged in the story. Something to keep in mind, as you can see here, it's a lot harder to keep all of your geometry of your page even, that's a lot of dense space right there, when you are varying your page or your panel shape size or your panel shape in general. If we go from a circular panel, to another square panel, or even from a circular panel to a triangular panel. I'm using some very primitive forms right now. You are missing a whole bunch of space each time that we do that. We need to be careful think about how we're going to plan the shapes out across the page so that they continue to make sense. The other thing to worry about is that it'll be even more difficult to read. Remember our goal is to make sure that our readers are essentially doing this motion. If we have a triangle, square, circle, trapezoid, quadrilateral and then we have something that is more of an isosceles triangle, it makes it much harder to figure out where our eyes are supposed to track which is the primary objective. Rectangles are very solid and reliable shapes, they make readers feel more comfortable and that's what they're more used to. That's something that you want to keep in mind. It's a very solid reading experience to know where the bottom of the panel is always going to line up and where the sides of the panel is going to line up and they're always going to be parallel to each other or perpendicular to each other depending on what you're comparing. Other shapes will feel more off balanced by comparisons, so you can use that to great effect if you would like to create that visual tension along with your narrative tension. Where I would start if I were you, starting the play with panel shape variation, I would take a handy-dandy rectangle and start by bisecting it. We've got two triangles here and they fit inside the same space as our rectangle. We're really not messing up any of the other panels that we want to do, but it makes it easier for us to start playing with that different kind of panel shape. We can do this to have two characters interacting maybe on the phone or something like that. This is a good to start with something. The thing here is that we're composing this as a single rectangle and we're creating the odd shapes later. Something else that we could do is start with a triangle, and then trapezoid, and then another triangle. We could start doing something like that. Or we could have one big panel, and inside of that panel we can have a square, where someone is talking, screaming, or whatever they might be doing. That's a good way to start playing around with those different shapes without having to totally reinvent the wheel or re-engineer how your page layout brain works. We can still operate all of this within the same grid system that we operated in before. That's really the key to keeping it simple, operating in that grid first, and then pulling at the corners of your shapes after you've already done that and that helps keep it readable. I want you to do now, is try a couple of pages with some varying shapes on them and try to keep it legible. Don't put any artwork in it, just see if you can figure out. I've got a triangle right here, I need something right here, maybe I can get away with not doing that, I can do as trapezoid with one diagonal angle. Whatever it is that you're doing, go ahead and try that. Try and keep that linear comic flow in motion and see how that impacts your page in how you read it. 7. Telling A Story: Welcome back, everybody. Last lesson we talked about Panel shape variation for a few minutes. This time we're going to bring everything together by talking about telling a story. What we're going to look at right here is that this is just some rough pages of a comic that I worked on for 24-hour comic day. I think it's a good example of when to choose certain panels over another for framing. It's important to remember that all of these page layout tools are really meant to help you tell your story. If you get anxious at the thought of managing different panel shapes and sizes, stick to a comfortable grid. Even if you find yourself comfortable experimenting, makes sure that you have a reason to change the size or shape of each panel. In this instance, looking at this, I have a favor like a two vertical panels and two horizontal panels. I like to draw pretty big. I like to get a lot of detail in there. I think hell boy does this a lot as well. I really like to stick to that because it really lets me focus on each image. It has the added bonus of less drawing per page, but you can see these first two are pretty equal in terms of their general size and shape, they're just following the grid system. I didn't really need to change it. The thing about that is, it really makes it easier for me to make decisions as I've been telling you. Make less decisions, it will help you get it done. Now, in this case, I wanted to have something a little bit wider so that we could see in the background these tall spires, then we need to see this guy down here in the sand. So I made it a little bit longer horizontally and [inaudible] also worked because I knew that the next panel that I wanted was going to be him looking up at this weird black sun and the reason that we're doing this is primarily so that we can ensure that we fit all of the elements in the panel. We've got this relationship right here and that is what we're really focusing on. That's what I put the panel page layout altogether for, and then we get to the final panel of the page, and it's supposed to be more or less a panoramic vista. So I focused on making it long horizontally so that we can get all of these spires in. We could also show the trail that he's taken as he goes across the sand, our little guy right there. That really helps me make less decisions when it comes to exactly what I'm trying to tell for the story. On this next page that he comes up to one of the spires. So let's just make this panel, let's make it a large panel, like I was just talking about two lessons ago. Let's make it large so that we can see all the way up and see his height in comparison to the height of the aspire. That breaks the panel. It goes all the way out. That really helps us give a sense of size variation. Just because we want the reader to know that it's still there, we're going to do a little bit shorter, but we really just need to focus on his expression and what he's doing. For the last one, we're really just trying to keep things simple, I didn't need to tell any more on this page. So I've got something that is showing what he sees, which is a reverse shot. That's something I'll cover in a future lesson, which is really directing the camera for your comic so that you can see this stuff, but he looks around the spire, and he sees this body of water right here, this platform, it's breaking down here. More spires off in the distance. Then these dunes which just go on forever and ever. That's really as simple as it gets. I'm doing a basic grid and I'm only pulling these different panels out as I need to, to tell the story. In some cases, I'm pulling them out vertically and in some cases, I'm pulling them up horizontally or vertically or across horizontally. That's all that I'm doing. I'm just really trying to figure out what do I want to highlight for the story in this panel and can I move the panel shape or the panel size to help direct that? Listen, the main thing that I want you to take away from this is that your page layout process can be so much less stressful if you start from the basic foundation. I've got two and three. You can make it extremely basic and still tell an effective story, and only change those things when the story demands it. This will also prevent you from making it too flashy and getting ahead of yourself and making your story harder to read. Now listen, at the end of the day, the story is what people will remember, not your page layout. Make sure that your pages are legible first and foremost, and make everything else secondary, all of it. I hope that you got something out of this lesson in particular because I think it's the most important takeaway. With that, I'll go ahead and wrap it up, and we'll do a class wrap-up. 8. Class Wrap Up: Thanks again for joining me on this journey to learn how to lay out a comic book page. I know it hasn't been easy for all of you. I know that it's something that I still struggle with myself, but I do know that this is a helpful way to view this process so that you can do it with a little bit less stress and a little more focus on story in the future. We did cover a lot. We covered comic book formats or just comic formats in general, we covered linear comic panel flow, we covered panel size and shape variation. Then we covered narrative structure and telling your story with your page layout. That was a fair amount to cover. But what I want you to focus on right now, is just going to the class project and laying out 3-5 different pages, no artwork. Just lay out those panels on the page and see how you can make each page read a little bit differently and accomplish a different goal, even without any artwork in it. When you've done that, go ahead and share your sample pages in the class projects section so that other people can see what creative variations you've come up with for your comic book pages. I promise if you stick to these simple foundations, it will help you make better pages more easily. With that said, I'm going to let you guys get to your comics, because I know that I have plenty to create myself. Thanks so much for joining me and have fun creating.