Comic Page Layouts: 2 Different Methods

hey there everybody it's Mark krly I'm back with another how to draw video sorry it's been so long since my last video I am in the middle of creating a new graphic novel and it is just taking up all my time but I promise there will be more videos to come uh in the months ahead today we're going to be talking about page layouts for comic books and I'm going to show you two different ways of laying out the same page now this first one is going to be the most straightforward version of the layout that I can think of it's got 1 2 3 4 5 six panels all of them just squares and uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in and uh all in time lapse uh maybe just going to do the first two squares as I said in this really straightforward way but let's look at this script this little piece of script that I've come up with uh and this is what I would do if I were creating a comic book for myself and I would just be writing this for myself for my own uh instruction almost man is sitting at home reading the doorbell rings ding dong he goes to the door opens it and finds that it's a local boy from the neighborhood and the man says David what are you doing here David says you said someday I'll take you fishing so here I am the man says I said that yesterday someday doesn't mean tomorrow uh and some of you may recognize this is a little bit adapted from one of my books uh the drawing lesson the similar circumstance that I had in that story but what I'm going to do is take these opening lines here and start to translate them into comic book form and as I said I'm going to do this in the most straightforward um you know first thing that pops into your head way possible and then when we get to the second version uh we'll be seeing hopefully slightly more creative ways of doing it so I'm going to do this all in time lapse the first two panels okay so here you see the way I've done it in pretty much the most straightforward way possible and if you look at what I originally wrote man is sitting at home reading the doorbell rings dingdong he goes to the door opens it well we haven't gotten to the opens it part so that kind of stops right there uh in terms of what I have Illustrated and you know by drawing the character from head to toe it almost feels like a stage play like when you're in the theater um you see all the actors from head to toe a little bit from the side like this you know this is what I mean by a very straightforward way of doing things and in a minute I'm going to come back and maybe try to be a little more uh creative but this is certainly a legitimate way of doing comics and very the advantage of it very easy to understand no one's going to get confused here in terms of what's Happening all right let's move on to the next two panels okay so I've got the these uh panels three and four here that really uh just go into that little next little bit there he opens the door and finds that it's a local boy from the neighborhood David what are you doing here uh now in the first panel I chose not to show the boy's um face I suppose I could have put a little hint of that there but for now let's just leave it so that there's a mystery in this panel and then we see him uh in the second panel uh noticed uh even time lapse you probably saw that I got the words in early um and I like to do that I like to leave space for the words before I do all the drawing um and the truth is I would do a very rough version of this before even getting to this uh stage so as to accommodate uh the speech bubbles I think that's very important and that's a big part of my process is you know not waiting until the end to drop in the space uh speech bubbles if you put them in first then you know how much space is left uh for the artwork but again we continue to see everything from the side right uh which again to me has this sort of stage play feeling to it very easy to understand no danger of being confused but to me just a little bit dull uh this way of presenting the scene still let's continue basically using this same approach uh and finish it up with the final two panels okay so here we have with the uh David saying you said someday I'll take you fishing so here I am and uh this so far nameless middle-aged man I said that yesterday someday doesn't mean tomorrow uh and uh you know this is not meant to be like a standalone strip that would make you laugh this is really meant to seem like part of a larger story that could continue in both directions

uh with more material before and after it in any case we continue to see everyone in the same pose uh basically that they were uh from the beginning uh which is to say the angle the camera angle if you imagine there's a camera filming this has not really changed much from the beginning to the end I've allowed myself to gradually zoom in that's the one thing but uh you know there's some people uh who will just stick with this approach all the way through and never zoom in um that being said we are going to do a lot more interesting things in the second uh version of this uh comic strip page so let's go ahead and jump into it okay so here we have the first two panels and uh you can see of course that I put considerably more time into them uh to begin with than I did with this but there these are done in two different styles I would say this is done in almost like a newspaper comic strip style this one uh and this is more like my own comic book style would be if I were doing this for publication so one thing to point out is that we're not covering the same material in these two panels um I only get so far as the dingdong here whereas uh in the other one we get the dingdong in the very first panel uh and he's walking to the door in the second panel well this just shows you that you've got choices as a Comic Book Creator in terms of what you do with the panels how many panels are needed for what now why is this panel so wide um because to me it's a little bit of an establishing shot I want to give you the feeling of what it's like to be in this guy's living room so I've added this table and stuff like that this one sort of uh is more Bare Bones we don't need to feel like we're in the living room he's sitting in a chair that's it's enough he's in his house we get it um you know there's I'm using a perspective scheme here different stuff like that this is just my way that I would do things one interesting thing to point out is that I changed ding-dong to Ting Tong which is uh my preference I don't like to use cookie cutter pre-existing sound effects like ding-dong which you almost could look up in the dictionary uh I like to turn them into words that you can't find in the dictionary at least as far as I know you can't find Ting Tong it is only a sound effect and nothing else but I think from the beginning we're getting a little more of a feeling of mystery here oh he was not expecting anyone right whereas in this first one we don't see we don't get any emotional reaction from him with the doorbell ringing um and that's just you know I suppose the UK can't when you're so far away see his face and that's part of why I created this panel where we zoom in quite tightly and um realize as part of the storytelling oh this is not an expected visitor let's move on now to this next row of panels and I think you're going to see that we make even more drastic changes all right so you can see lots of different changes here the main thing being that we've got three panels instead of two uh and uh that we've zoomed in real close just to so show the hand turning the door knob here I think it's always interesting when you've got a series of panels that show uh fa faces and sort of upper bodies uh to get one panel in which we get a zoom in on something else in this case the hand on the door knob also it sort of delays this moment of Revelation here we've started to wonder oh who Could That Be and we get a panel that is pretty close to this panel really just I think from a slightly more interesting um uh angle uh and then this delays that moment of opening the door uh and before we get to this last panel which is one of my favorite things to do here we have done the most drastic change of angle we've actually moved outside of the house and are looking back in part of this is determined by me wanting to see that look of surprise on his face and also to keep uh David here a little bit more of a mystery for a slightly longer time um but also anytime I think that you can change uh the angle the point of view uh drastically um it's worth considering uh again to break up the sort of rep competition of you know

interior of the house oh boy now suddenly we're on the exterior of the house well let's move on and get into the last um panels that will complete this page this two-page comparison uh of the exact same scene okay so these are the final two panels and here um we've got quite a different angle here I think compared to almost anything we've seen here we've um taken the camera up a little high above the two characters uh so as to see from uh kind of above the man's uh shoulder down towards David this gives us more of a complete view of David and I suppose it's a little unfair because in this one I didn't uh choose to show him holding um the uh you know uh fishing line which I probably could have snuck in there but I think because of the way I set this up there's just not that much space for it whereas here we get to toss those in and I think it adds to the humor doesn't it if we actually see him having arrived with the fishing pole in The Tackle Box he's all ready to go uh based on the guy having said someday I'll take you fishing um and so yeah this is a yet again um an angle that's kind of determined by what we want the viewer to see um and also just sort of cutting up the panel in the most interesting way I think coming up and getting a elevated point of view allows us to get some interesting diagonal lines and so forth that make this a kind of a more Dynamic and visually interesting image and then of course here this is more or less my standard go-to when the emotion of the character uh is important I zoom in so that we get a good look at uh the guy's face I'm going to tighten up these lower eyelids for some reason that adds something to uh the degree of uh hostility being displayed here you might have seen that I had the mouth open even wider for a minute there and it just seemed like he was bellowing too loudly um for the situation for the amount of annoyance that he felt so I reduced the size of the mouth this kind of thing is very common for me uh tweaking facial expressions and so forth so as to get the humor the best it can be well I'm going to pull the camera way back so that we can see both of these um uh illustration Styles side by side all right well there you have it two different pages that are derived uh from the same script and you know as I said this one I clearly put a lot more time into this one is done in a much more simplistic way but I do think it is in keeping with that sort of six panel approach it's almost expected that you're going to be a little more stripped back and keeping it like a classic oldfashioned newspaper uh comic strip uh whereas this uh as I said this is kind of my way of uh how I would uh create uh a page for publication this of course not being ready for publication it would need to be Inked and colored and all that good stuff but before I go I always like to say thank you to anyone who has supported me by getting any of my books like the comic book lesson this book definitely has all of my best advice about uh creating Comics mastering manga 1 2 and three these also have a lot of information about uh page layouts and different uh comic book storytelling techniques and my very latest book lost in Taiwan I'm thrilled to say that a Taiwanese uh Edition is coming out just around the time that you see this video so greetings to anyone in Taiwan if you've picked up the Chinese language edition of Lost in Taiwan very excited uh about that new publication but I think it's time for me to lay down this pencil and thank you all uh one more time for watching this video I really hope you enjoyed it and I'll be back with another one real soon