CalamityJon

23 Comments

  1. haha, awesome. I’m a frequent offender of several. Nr 1, 2, 9, 10 and especially nr 13 (feet in perspective *brrrrrr!*). The only one I don’t agree with is nr 1. I actually prefer talking heads with their mouth closed for most types of art unless there is a particular expression that is needed. For four through eight I think it’s ok to not redraw backgrounds for every panel.


    Vir Bonus

  2. I'll cede photostatting the backgrounds, but oh lord how I hate the photostatted foreground figure …

  3. I think 8, when used well can convey a sense of awkwardness, however, I certainly use it quite a bit mainly due to laziness.

  4. I love this list not because of its judgments about people's usage, but because it identifies so many great patterns in the way people create panels. I wish more people would make lists of conventional patterns like this. I don't want to bogart your comments section, but if anyone's interested, I've written up a bit more about this article over at my blog.

    ——- Studying the Visual Language of "Comics" – http://www.emaki.net

  5. That's an interesting angle on Jon's comic. Folks jumping over to Neil's post unfamiliar with his previous writing might want to read through some of his Comics Theory 101 columns here at Comixpedia to understand better Neil's terms "visual language" and "art perspective".

    ____

    Xaviar Xerexes

    On second thought, let's not go to Comixpedia. It is a silly place.

  6. Wow just about every one of those were Matt Groening's bread and butter in that series!

  7. Damn, why didn’t I notice this earlier?

    A lot of good stuff there, not so much on the these-pictures-are-stupid scale but on the this-has-been-done-a-lot field. Gotta agree with GiantPanda, though. I’ve used #1 a lot myself, for several good reasons.

    One, still pistures of people with their mouths open tend to look stupid.

    Then, sometimes there are two or more people talking in one panel. If they all have their mouths open, it will look as if they’re talking at the same time.

    Most importantly, though: The purpose of the panel isn’t to show that someone is talking. The speech balloon covers that. The image should deliver emotional information on how the speech is delivered, and sometimes an open mouth just gives the wrong impression. Related to that, the image can focus on an entirely different action (like the Ridiculous Fight Scene mentioned in the comments). The image doesn’t follow the text or mark the moment when the text is being said. The image stands for itself, and the text illuminates an aspect of it.

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