Panel 2: Clutter

Welcome back to How NOT to Write Comics! This time around I'm going to discuss what I fondly refer to as "Clutter." Essentially, what this comes down to is that a comic page has limited space since we're dealing with a real physical surface and it becomes all too easy to fill up that space and more quickly than you'd think!

There are two sub-sections to this discussion so I'm going to tackle each one separately. The first is Planel Clutter. Captions are great, you can use them to tell dates, times, locations, or even a character's thoughts or to offer narration. However, it's really easy to get carried away, especially if you're tackling something along the lines of a noir or detective story.

I've seen it more times than I can count but you often see someone has five panels on a page, they have eleven captions, seven lines of dialogue three sound effects, and want actual action in the panels. That just isn't going to work. At all. And it's a quick way to make your artist want to murder you in your sleep. What it comes down to realizing what will legitimately fit on a page. If you have to have a lot of captions on a particular page, keep the action and dialogue to a minimum, particularly in caption heavy panels. 

My best recommendation for a writer who is struggling with this is to thumbnail out your pages complete with actions, word bubbles, sound effects, and caption boxes. (If you don't know, thumbnails are essentially small-scale sketches of comic panels.) But thumbnailing your page will give you a very real idea of what you can and cannot fit. And it doesn't need to be pretty... seriously, it can look like utter crap, but it'll help you understand the limited real estate that is the comic book page. And NO CHEATING. You can't put a little tiny box where a three sentence caption is going to go.

Another important thing to remember is that comics is a visual medium. If you're essentially using captions to tell your story, you're doing it wrong. But I will dedicate an entire post to this problem in the future.

The other half of this discussion is Page Clutter. It has the same principles as Panel Clutter but on a larger scale. Essentially, this is more or less about panel count, size, and content. Personally, I try to keep my panel count to six or less per page. Occasionally, if I've got a few very small panels I may sneak in seven or maybe eight. I don't think I've ever gone above nine, unless we were dealing with a larger format like the one-page Igor story "The Familiar" which was printed at a larger scale of 10.5" x 16" as opposed to your regular 6.625" x 10.25" comic page.

Also it's important to realize that more panels equals smaller panels. So the more panels you've got per page the less imperative those actions ought to be. In comics we often equate panel size with event importance. The bigger the panel, the more important the action/event. So, don't have some ground-breaking moment in a little tiny panel on a page filled with other little tiny panels. 

Realize, too, that you can't have four people in a small panel fighting or performing elaborate actions or even having a lengthy discussion or sprawling landscapes in panels of this size. The smaller your panels get the less you can do with them. Also you can't ask for six wide panels on a page, unless you want them all to be really, really short. Again this is all the sort of thing that can be helped by thumbnailing your pages.

Well, I think I've hit all the points that I intended for this posting. Next week, the post won't be going up on Monday as it's Christmas Eve and I know a lot of you will be busy so next week's post will go up Wednesday December 26th to account for that. Have a wonderful and safe holiday and I'll see you all then!