Panels are a vital part of a comic page. Without panels, virtually every page of a comic would be a splash page, and comics would essentially be storybooks. Many creators tend to frame each panel inside a border, but this doesn’t always have to be the case. Let’s take a look at a page that has 5 panels, each with a border.
This method works perfectly fine. It’s clear and easy to understand the layout. But let’s see what happens when we remove the borders from around panel 2 and let the imagery of that panel bleed to the edge of the page.
The layout of the page is still perfectly clear, but now it’s a little more interesting. Removing the borders of a panel is often done to help convey space or dramatic effect. We can even go so far as to remove the borders from around panel 5.
Borderless panels (sometimes called “open panels”) do not always have to occur along the edges of the page. Here is an example of a borderless panel surrounded by bordered panels. The surrounding panels create a frame for panel 5.
A splash page is essentially a large borderless panel. But what if you have a page that requires one large panel and one smaller panel? You can create a splash page with an inset panel such as this one.
None of these examples are right, and none of them are wrong. Sure, some of the greatest comics ever written used frequent standard borders. Watchmen is one of the best example of this, using grid-like panel layouts on almost every page – 3 rows down, 3 columns across. However, using borderless panels is just another option we are provided with when drawing a comic page. Borderless panels can help make a page more dynamic and visually appealing to the reader.
By Michael Yakutis, Making Comics (dotCom) Community Liaison.
makingcomics.com
Panel design is an art form in and of itself. There is more than one artist working professionally that I love for their page layouts exclusively — their faces, anatomy, figure posing etc is not my cup of tea at all, but I really have to give them props just for making such intriguing panels.
It’s right up there with lettering in my “things I gave zero consideration to until the moment I tried it for myself” list regarding comics.
There’s one thing to bear in mind when creating unique panel designs, and it’s flow. Does the shape and placement of your panels work together with your lettering and your staging to properly lead the reader’s eye through the page? Without drawing tiny little arrows in the gutters, mind you! When first experimenting with new frames it’s easy to get overzealous and lose the flow. This can result in the reader getting lost, focusing on details that aren’t important because they’ve been led into a corner like someone who’s taken a wrong turn in a maze.
Grids are safer, but damn is it fun to experiment!
Careful placement of lettering, in my experience, can completely cover for unobvious panel reading order. This blog post by Eddie Campbell (Bacchus, From Hell, Alec) lays down some great rules to do this with; internalizing them was pretty much a requirement for me to do the crazy layouts I’m doing on Rita.
True. I would say word balloon placement is more important that panel placement/borders. Have you ever read Alan Moore’s, Promethea?? Omg, the layouts in that book…Heavily reliant on word balloon and border placement. By far the most complex layouts I’ve ever seen.
Promethrea’s double-page spread with the infitity pathway is one of the finest pages a comic has ever contained. Moore takes great pride in using comics to do things that could never be achieved in any other media, and that scene is a prime example. Truly inspiring!
That one always stands out to me the most. It was astounding.
In each and every book I’ve read about comic making always had a large part about borders and the types you can do. I think making borders is my most favorite part of the creation process, because you can sit there and decide how do you want the image and text to be framed.
All time favorite comic book character? Kid Flash from young justice.
One of my favorite artists of all time is Bryan Hitch (of the Authority, the Ultimates, and now his creator-owned book Real Heroes), who sticks almost fastidiously to the grid. However, he made the grid work for him by using the thick black gutters to emphasize the action within the panels. He helped pioneer the “widescreen” style of storytelling, the kind that reverse engineered the grandeur of a big-budget movie to work on the comic page. (This especially comes to light when reading digital comics, as the dimensions of laptop and tablet screens are especially suited to widescreen framing).
Hitch is one of the main influences on my own layouts, even though I admittedly can’t match the level of detail he puts into his drawings. I recognize the appeal of borderless panels, but I personally prefer to use the gutters as a storytelling tool.
Bryan Hitch has a pretty good drawing book from some time ago. I found it at the library but it’s also on Amazon. Worth taking a look.
One of the things that has always attracted me to manga (and to a certain extent, European comics) is how they break out of the typical rectangular frame structure. Figures spilling outside of frames, diagonal lines used as panel borders, odd shaped panels, etc. make for more visually interesting layouts, and give more possibilities to what can be done on a page.
Some of the earlier comics I made used much more loose paneling, granted I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Moving to a strict 9 panel sort of layout really helped improve my work. I tend to find more freedom in restriction, if that makes sense. Though I do question whether it was the right choice for my current webcomic.
I always frame each panel inside a border, but find comics that eliminate one or two borders to be visually interesting and “outside the box”, so to speak.
I started out without borders, and while this worked okay for the short, 4/3/2-panel comics without a background because they weren’t set anywhere in particular, but when making longer comics, like the Atari storyline, the different panels without borders between them didn’t look as good anymore.
Started adding borders September this year, and it’s been a huge improvement, so I kept using them. Even the 4-panel, backgroundless comics have borders now!
Would be fun to play more around with panel sizes and shapes in the future…