Page Layout in Comic Books

The western world reads from the left to the right and the top to the bottom of a printed page of text and these rules apply to a comic book page too.

In the early days, when comic books were made by reprinting comic strips from the newspapers, no one gave any thought to how well the cut up strips would "read" in a different layout.

The original format, of probably four panels in a row, for most cases, read well enough in a left to right orientation but cutting those four panels up and rearranging them in two tiers of two panels per tier... exposed some short comings in design for easy reading.

Despite the commonly held belief, that comic books are merely an arrangement of images in a grid, why do some examples of the medium stand out from the crowd?

READABILITY

It is a fine art, one where the artist subtly leads the reading eye through the panels on the page, reinforcing the pattern of reading that we all learned in childhood.

LEFT to RIGHT and TOP to BOTTOM

I was a very slow learner and it took me a very long time to be able to separate the storytelling from the story.

It is also very interesting, that in all the books about making comics, all the interviews with the artists make comics, most of them never remark on the importance of 

learning how to direct the reading eye.

In the summer of 1989, I sat in a seminar given by the very talented Ty Templeton at a Comic Book Convention at the Westbury Hotel on Yonge Street, here in Toronto.

Ty did his best, within the limits of a one hour tutoring session, to give us an idea of what was involved in the designing of a comic book page and it still took me another twenty years to really be able to see it!

Anyway, enough chatter.  Here is an annotated page, drawn  by the talented and prolific Matt Howarth, that displays his clear understanding of his craft.

In fact, this page almost acts as two pages because a page turn over could have occured at the point where the diver enters the water... What happens next?... but instead, the reading eye is dragged up to the top of the page and then pulled back down through the last two panels for a more interesting page turn over (human interest is now involved with the introduction of a new character) when the diver lands on top of the girl.

I hope that someone out there finds something helpful in my ramblings about making comic books.  It is a fascinating subject and I have enjoyed tracking it down, through the years, to arrive at the understanding that I have today.

One last thing.  JOE KUBERT had an amazing understanding of page layout and anything that he drew, especially in his later years, should be considered to be Comic Book Layout 101.  The two books that he wrote on the subject,

Superheroes : Joe Kubert's Wonderful World of Comics

and

Joe Kubert's Comic Book Studio

should be required reading for anyone who is interested in learning how to be a comic book artist.