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Description
Hey, THIS piece should really rack up the pageviews, huh? Anyhoo, just out of sheer perversity, I decided to post the “ panel grid” sheet I use when drawing pages for EMPOWERED, my “sexy superhero comedy” published by Dark Horse comics.

EMPOWERED is drawn on cheap, letter-sized (8.5” X 11” ) copy paper that’s so flimsy and fragile that I can’t tape it down and rule off panels with a T-square, triangle and ruler, as I would normally do with more conventionally robust art board. Instead, I measured off a grid of thirds and quarters* on the sheet of letter-sized paper above, and now use this “ panel grid” to mark off panel sizes on other sheets of copy paper. More specifically, I make marks on either side (or top and bottom) of the new paper at, say, the 1/3 proportion, connect ’em using a pencil and my trusty triangle, then go back over the resulting lines with a Sharpie marker (and triangle) to produce the bold black panel borders seen in EMPOWERED. (Note that I can “bias” the Sharpied borders to one side or another of the original line, in order to gain a li’l bit more size for a particular panel.)

I originally developed this “variable grid” technique strictly to cope with the fragility of the paper, but I’ve noticed a few other advantages to it: A), Tracing marks off a pre-ruled grid is much faster than taping down art board and measuring panel sizes with a ruler; and B), working off a grid tends to make my pages a bit more simply laid out and easier to read. Much of my earlier work often featured sharply tilted or angling borders and other somewhat exotic layout techniques, which might be offputting to “comics noobs,” if you will. As I’m interested in EMPOWERED being as readable as possible to a wider audience than much of my other, more techy-oriented material might be (er, despite EMPOWERED’s adult-skewed content, that is), this was a bit of a happy accident.

Note that there’s one more step I could take to make EMPOWERED even more readable... Namely, I could use “manga gutters” on its pages. In manga, the vertical gutters between panels are very thin and the horizontal gutters are VERY thick (usually in a 1:3 vertical: horizontal ratio), in order to ensure that the reader’s eyetrack stays on a particular (horizontal) tier of panels and doesn’t stray down to an out-of-sequence panel below. In general, I recommend the technique to almost all comics artists, especially ones aiming for a clearly “manga-influenced” vibe to their work... but I myself DON’T use the technique. That’s because the extreme thickness of multiple “manga-style” horizontal gutters on a page would lop off the equivalent of a few lines of lettering space from my word balloons, which would be highly problematic**... especially since EMPOWERED’s lettering size is quite large, for maximum clarity. This problem is worsened by the fact that EMPOWERED is drawn 8.5” X 11”, a far shorter, “squatter” size than the normal, “taller” proportions seen in most comics pages. Thus, vertical headspace is always at a premium... and THAT’S why I don’t use “manga gutters.”

*And, you’ll notice, some assorted measurements BETWEEN the quarters and thirds, for when I need more space for a given panel.

**Obviously, this isn’t an issue for the vertically oriented copy of Japanese-language comics.

Description
Hey, THIS piece should really rack up the pageviews, huh? Anyhoo, just out of sheer perversity, I decided to post the “ panel grid” sheet I use when drawing pages for EMPOWERED, my “sexy superhero comedy” published by Dark Horse comics.

EMPOWERED is drawn on cheap, letter-sized (8.5” X 11” ) copy paper that’s so flimsy and fragile that I can’t tape it down and rule off panels with a T-square, triangle and ruler, as I would normally do with more conventionally robust art board. Instead, I measured off a grid of thirds and quarters* on the sheet of letter-sized paper above, and now use this “ panel grid” to mark off panel sizes on other sheets of copy paper. More specifically, I make marks on either side (or top and bottom) of the new paper at, say, the 1/3 proportion, connect ’em using a pencil and my trusty triangle, then go back over the resulting lines with a Sharpie marker (and triangle) to produce the bold black panel borders seen in EMPOWERED. (Note that I can “bias” the Sharpied borders to one side or another of the original line, in order to gain a li’l bit more size for a particular panel.)

I originally developed this “variable grid” technique strictly to cope with the fragility of the paper, but I’ve noticed a few other advantages to it: A), Tracing marks off a pre-ruled grid is much faster than taping down art board and measuring panel sizes with a ruler; and B), working off a grid tends to make my pages a bit more simply laid out and easier to read. Much of my earlier work often featured sharply tilted or angling borders and other somewhat exotic layout techniques, which might be offputting to “comics noobs,” if you will. As I’m interested in EMPOWERED being as readable as possible to a wider audience than much of my other, more techy-oriented material might be (er, despite EMPOWERED’s adult-skewed content, that is), this was a bit of a happy accident.

Note that there’s one more step I could take to make EMPOWERED even more readable... Namely, I could use “manga gutters” on its pages. In manga, the vertical gutters between panels are very thin and the horizontal gutters are VERY thick (usually in a 1:3 vertical: horizontal ratio), in order to ensure that the reader’s eyetrack stays on a particular (horizontal) tier of panels and doesn’t stray down to an out-of-sequence panel below. In general, I recommend the technique to almost all comics artists, especially ones aiming for a clearly “manga-influenced” vibe to their work... but I myself DON’T use the technique. That’s because the extreme thickness of multiple “manga-style” horizontal gutters on a page would lop off the equivalent of a few lines of lettering space from my word balloons, which would be highly problematic**... especially since EMPOWERED’s lettering size is quite large, for maximum clarity. This problem is worsened by the fact that EMPOWERED is drawn 8.5” X 11”, a far shorter, “squatter” size than the normal, “taller” proportions seen in most comics pages. Thus, vertical headspace is always at a premium... and THAT’S why I don’t use “manga gutters.”

*And, you’ll notice, some assorted measurements BETWEEN the quarters and thirds, for when I need more space for a given panel.

**Obviously, this isn’t an issue for the vertically oriented copy of Japanese-language comics.