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🕑 Added 2022-04-21 01:58:37 +0000 UTCThere are a few key differences between the design culture of American, European, and East Asian comic books.
If you look at European comics (Jazz Maynard, Animal Castle, etc.) the panels are usually smaller, more numerous, less diverse in size, and arranged to completely fill every spare inch of the page.
Consequently, European comics tend to read more like a story board for a piece of film. It certainly has its charm.
Then at the other end of the spectrum you have East Asian comics (like Manga, and Manhwa). Here the panels are on average bigger, fewer per page, ranging wildly in size, and subject to a large variety of kooky layouts.
Here, unlike in European comics, attention is given to how the panels interact with one another. Like characters being rendered on a plane above the borders of the panel, and are able to reach outside of the confines of that panel for dramatic effect.
The layout and shape of the panels are often used to help carry lines of motion just as much as the contents of the panels. Notice how in lots of manga, the divides between panels become more erratic during pages of intense action, deviating from purely vertical and horizontal.
American comics areeeeeee... somewhere in the middle. To put it simply.
More thought is given to how the panels play together than in European comics (where this is almost totally ignored) but not as much as in manga.
The average panel count in American comics is less than in Europe, but usually more than in East Asia.
Part of why manga can be so vibrant and kinetic with its panels is that the pacing of story telling in Japan is waaaaay slower (like characters spending an entire chapter philosophizing about the punch they're going to throw any minute now.) As such extremely large panels that take up almost the entire page (if not the entire page) will be used freely if they think it adds weight to the contents.
This is a big thing in Eastern comics. They play with the flow of time to emphasize dramatic beats, and they play with the feeling of space by contrasting small panels with very large ones.
In American and European comics, where the flow of time is more static, and the pace of the story is a lot faster, spending precious page real-estate on a single dramatic moment plus maybe a few supplementary panels cannot be easily justified.
But this is my comic.
And I do as I please!
The major thing going on in this page is such an intense buildup followed by a dramatic anti climax.
I wanted to use the page itself (the panel layout) to deliver that feeling. So the first two panels are cramped and overlapping slightly (which feel kinetic to me) and then the third panel is so empty and still.
If I could do it again I might make the second panel smaller to provide even more room in the third panel, and in the third panel I might have made Spider-Woman even smaller. But not too much smaller, because then I'd risk making how alone she is the point of the panel, when the point is the stillness. That nothing happened despite her expectations.
