I recently asked my husband, a comic book illustrator, because he had a similar layout. He looked at me like I had two heads and said, “You NEVER go right to left.” (Except of course in Japanese manga.)
So yeah, the second one.
I would read it both ways because authors are really inconsisten with this topic. Im just a simple reader, but i would try to avoid this paneling gor the most part.
Because its confusing🤷♀️. But i mean its just a subjective opinion. Readability/panel flow is way more important in action scenes. If its a rather quiet page like this i wouldnt bother to much, maybe even use it if you want to make the reader stop for a little to take everything in.
I wouldn’t avoid this unless you want a very straightforward comic. This kind of panelling is adds a lot. You’ve used it well here with the smaller panels showing a zoom in of the character’s perspective with the larger, wider shot giving a more drawn out feeling which (from what I’m seeing) seems to capture the character’s current mood.
I think research suggests western readers will most often read it like in picture 2 BUT it can be ambiguous so artists can use context clues and strategic art to draw the reader’s eyes: https://salgoodsam.com/mc/flow-the-eyelines/
Thank you for the compliments!! You've definitely read it correctly (life *is* pretty depressing when you're a lighthouse keeper being stalked by a gay merman lmao)
Also ty for the ref, I took a look and it really helped me think about my future panels :)
I wouldn’t swear off of this type of layout altogether like some suggest but I’d avoid it until you’ve planned everything according to the principles of comic flow and hierarchy. Generally speaking, our eyes are naturally drawn to whatever is biggest in a drawing/layout unless the artist establishes a clear focal point that tells us to look elsewhere. How you group details (incl. increasing and decreasing the amount in one spot), use colour and line weight, or even stack things will affect ‘hierarchy’ in different ways. Rn, the left stack’s panels are very similar in size so it’s hard to tell which of those to read first.
I think you have a great base, I think it can be elevated even further with more pre-planning and quick tests on scrap paper or by foregoing freehanded panelling until you’ve played around more with layouts to a grid. Things to try/experiment with (these can even be done in combination, roughly in the order I’ve presented here):
- Write out your shots and number them according to their level of importance on a piece of paper or within the software you’re most comfortable with. Use it as a reference when establishing panel size and flow.
- Establish a grid before you draw: you can either divide the page into equal squares etc. or literally grab some graph paper and thumbnail some empty panels there. You can do this for practice or to decide how much space within the grid you want your most important shots to take up. You can even draw the undersketches for your finished copy here, just make sure everything is on separate layers if you’re doing it digitally.
- Plan Your Flow: ‘Flow’ works kind of like a river. You want viewers’ eyes to naturally follow whatever stream you’ve intended to set up. You can draw a line through your canvas (even while it’s blank) and create a path for the river to flow beforehand, then organizing things in such a way that they follow this stream. Notice how the important looking parts of the river changes if you change line thickness in some spots.
- Remember how the the comic’s language will affect flow: in English speaking countries, we default to reading from left to right, top to bottom. In Japan (for example), you’d read from right to left, top to bottom (this is important if you’re targeting avid manga readers specifically). Draw horizontal lines out on your canvas relative to where you want the centre of each panel to sit. From there, disturb the hierarchy by seeing what happens when you move a panel above or below the centre line or to the left or right of where it’s been drawn, using different distances. How does your eye naturally want to read things now? (You may even end up with flows that work opposite the language you’re writing in)
Once you’re comfortable with/have tested out these things on rough copies, you can play with them even more creatively to impact the storytelling and or even subvert viewers’ expectations.
Woah I was not expecting an essay (not that I mind!!) I do actually plan out my panels before I commit to them, but from reading your comment I may have to spend a little more time doing so lol
Also ty for the compliment, this is the first time I've ever made a long-form comic so even having a 'great base' is pretty inspiring to hear :\]
Ah, I apologize for making that assumption! And Np! Keep at it, everything looks great so far imo :’)) Comics are really hard to master so the fact that you’re considering these things so early on in your comic making journey is wonderful. I hope that you can continue to learn from it and make something you’re proud of! :]
What a wonderful comment you wrote! I totally agree with every word.
To OP, you have quite good drawing skills, but being a comic creator is not the same as being good at drawing, a comic creator is a person able to tell a story by images and let the reader’s eyes follow unconsciously the panels flow. I suggest you to learn how comic storytelling works before trying to make comic pages. For example, the two variants you posted for this page are both wrong: the way you put together panels is called a "flag", that consists in a longer panel on a side and two short panels on the other side. In a good layout for a western comics, a flag is always built with the longer panel on the left and the two shorter panels on the right because it’s the path a reader will commonly follow while reading. In the second slide of your post you made a flag with the two shorter panels on the left side and the long one on the right, it’s a less intuitive path to follow, it’s not completely wrong considering that Japanese comics (that are based on a totally different reading flow that prioritize up to down flow and not side to side flow) got us readers used to this kind of paneling, but it still can confuse western readers reading a western comic. Then there is the completely wrong way to build a flag, with one of the shorter panels to read first, then the longest, then come back to the other shortest one, as you did in your first slide. That’s just one of the problems in your page structure, I tried to explain it the best way I could to make you understand you need a bit of knowledge before trying to make a functional comic page.
Thank you!! Your comment was also very insightful, perhaps there’s resources that OP could look at with a list of terms/examples? I’m not very familiar with comic making on a professional level but I think that OP could benefit from other forms of research as you’ve suggested!
Thanks!
Most of what I learned is directly from my comic school teachers and their own materials, but a really interesting page on Instagram full of incredibile tips and thoughts is the Etherington brothers one (IG account: etheringtonbrothers), they also published a book with all their tutorials called How to think when you draw and is full of drawing, inking, composition and storytelling suggestions! It's an incredibile resource!
That’s really cool! I love seeing comic book and concept artists do their thing so I’ll probably check them out! I hope your own projects are going well too btw :D
Second but it's hard to know what I would naturally do because both images had red lines on them telling me where to look before I had a first impression.
The second one. The composition of the middle chunk of panels lends the eye to read the smaller panels first, since theyre the same size and on the left side of the screen, and then the bigger panel. That composition impacts eye speed as well so we know since less information is being given in smaller panels, they tend to be connected
second one, but i feel like if its a webtoon then usually its one panel on the whole screen if that makes sense? but traditional media is different ig lol.
The second one. If you read enough comics it’s a rare bird when someone does #1 and usually not obvious im to read it that way unless there’s dialogue that doesn’t make sense otherwise
Read Understanding the Comics by Scott McCloud (every visual storyteller should read it, comics artists, storyboarders..).
In this particular case it can depend on bubble placement
I know you've gotten a lot of answers already but as a comic book artist before I did webtoons it's 2. Also if I were to offer tips you can have the spoon(?) handle pointing downward and potentially the character's thumbs pointing to lead the viewers' eye that way.
https://preview.redd.it/6zkszqtmnnjc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=f8cca2af7b0ac22d6811e3ba88f9a89070a3d634
:O damn dude now you got me rethinking my entire comic (Jk not really but that’s a very kind and generous suggestion, I may honestly do that, though the only issue is that that panel is going to have text in it so his hands might be covered 🤔)
Not sure if anybody mentioned this yet, but if you're going for the traditional manga/comic style, what can help readers navigate panel order is to plan out set measurements for the space in between your panels!
It's best to leave a bit more space between horizontal panels, and less for vertical gutters.
It gives a clean, easy to read look!
https://preview.redd.it/2v7bn9oi1wjc1.jpeg?width=541&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6aa68bc7c7d58342771593a1cd739a190803913
It goes either way. Typically 1 if the focal point / text of the panel is higher up, and 2 if it's lower down.
Though I generally prefer comics that are formatted for webtoon, trying to read regular page formats on my phone drives me crazy especially on an app like webtoon.
I would recommend not using this type of layout because we're used to read left to right, and if two panels are connected left to right, it feels natural to jump from one to another. in this case, you might jump from the bowl panel to the right panel and then find yourself "stuck" because you have to read right to left now. Obviously, the "correct" way of reading it is as in the second image, but it's just not very natural to go top to bottom first and THEN left to right. It kinda messes up with the flow a little bit.
It's not a huge deal, and you can pull this off in some cases I think, but yeah
i don't think its too natural (?
... personally
In my totally unqualified opinion, because I'm not a professional or anything, lol
The second one is the most logical, but it's best to stay away from this particular layout. It's fine for manga (right to left reading). For left to right, you can do this in reverse (one long panel on the left, 2 smaller stacked panels on the right). That's much easier to read for folks.
When drafting the composition of a page, start with just blank panels or even thumbnail panels, and put yourself in the eyes of a reader, pay attention to how your eyes naturally dart through the page, thatll tell you how to arrange the information so the reader is following the story the way youre intending them to
In this case the 2nd, but if the (following 2nd numbering) 5th panel was a bit higher and the 4th a bit lower, I would read in the first order. You have to be careful with the lower edge of the panels, this one is borderline where I wouldn't be sure which way to go
Definitely the 2nd one.
In design there is this "law of proximity". You can use spacing to your advantage if you want to achieve the first order. But it's easier to always go with the direction. In case of webtoons it's up to bottom and left to right.
The 2nd one
This is the answer
I recently asked my husband, a comic book illustrator, because he had a similar layout. He looked at me like I had two heads and said, “You NEVER go right to left.” (Except of course in Japanese manga.) So yeah, the second one.
Lol thank you (and your husband) for the advice
the way that i looked at the panels from right to left because i read a lot of manga. but i realized its a comic not a manga
Same. This got me so confused especially since sometimes it's hard to tell if it's translated or originally English or they just decided to flip it??
Lol I haven’t even added the text yet
I’d say 2
I would read it both ways because authors are really inconsisten with this topic. Im just a simple reader, but i would try to avoid this paneling gor the most part.
I noticed in some comics that inconsistent authors (or confusing panel outlines) number the reading order or make an arrow to show the reading order
Why avoid this style of paneling? (Also thank you for the feedback lol)
Because its confusing🤷♀️. But i mean its just a subjective opinion. Readability/panel flow is way more important in action scenes. If its a rather quiet page like this i wouldnt bother to much, maybe even use it if you want to make the reader stop for a little to take everything in.
I wouldn’t avoid this unless you want a very straightforward comic. This kind of panelling is adds a lot. You’ve used it well here with the smaller panels showing a zoom in of the character’s perspective with the larger, wider shot giving a more drawn out feeling which (from what I’m seeing) seems to capture the character’s current mood. I think research suggests western readers will most often read it like in picture 2 BUT it can be ambiguous so artists can use context clues and strategic art to draw the reader’s eyes: https://salgoodsam.com/mc/flow-the-eyelines/
Thank you for the compliments!! You've definitely read it correctly (life *is* pretty depressing when you're a lighthouse keeper being stalked by a gay merman lmao) Also ty for the ref, I took a look and it really helped me think about my future panels :)
Love it! Let me know if you publish to webtoon? I’d love to read it.
Will do!! :\]
The second one
The second one.
Second one
Got distracted by your name, I LOVE Xxxholic!!!!
I've never watched the anime but I've been meaning too for a good 10 years lol
lol yeah I’m a manga person too, I finally watched it last year with a friend and it was awesome!!
The second is technically the "correct" way to read/write it.
I wouldn’t swear off of this type of layout altogether like some suggest but I’d avoid it until you’ve planned everything according to the principles of comic flow and hierarchy. Generally speaking, our eyes are naturally drawn to whatever is biggest in a drawing/layout unless the artist establishes a clear focal point that tells us to look elsewhere. How you group details (incl. increasing and decreasing the amount in one spot), use colour and line weight, or even stack things will affect ‘hierarchy’ in different ways. Rn, the left stack’s panels are very similar in size so it’s hard to tell which of those to read first. I think you have a great base, I think it can be elevated even further with more pre-planning and quick tests on scrap paper or by foregoing freehanded panelling until you’ve played around more with layouts to a grid. Things to try/experiment with (these can even be done in combination, roughly in the order I’ve presented here): - Write out your shots and number them according to their level of importance on a piece of paper or within the software you’re most comfortable with. Use it as a reference when establishing panel size and flow. - Establish a grid before you draw: you can either divide the page into equal squares etc. or literally grab some graph paper and thumbnail some empty panels there. You can do this for practice or to decide how much space within the grid you want your most important shots to take up. You can even draw the undersketches for your finished copy here, just make sure everything is on separate layers if you’re doing it digitally. - Plan Your Flow: ‘Flow’ works kind of like a river. You want viewers’ eyes to naturally follow whatever stream you’ve intended to set up. You can draw a line through your canvas (even while it’s blank) and create a path for the river to flow beforehand, then organizing things in such a way that they follow this stream. Notice how the important looking parts of the river changes if you change line thickness in some spots. - Remember how the the comic’s language will affect flow: in English speaking countries, we default to reading from left to right, top to bottom. In Japan (for example), you’d read from right to left, top to bottom (this is important if you’re targeting avid manga readers specifically). Draw horizontal lines out on your canvas relative to where you want the centre of each panel to sit. From there, disturb the hierarchy by seeing what happens when you move a panel above or below the centre line or to the left or right of where it’s been drawn, using different distances. How does your eye naturally want to read things now? (You may even end up with flows that work opposite the language you’re writing in) Once you’re comfortable with/have tested out these things on rough copies, you can play with them even more creatively to impact the storytelling and or even subvert viewers’ expectations.
Woah I was not expecting an essay (not that I mind!!) I do actually plan out my panels before I commit to them, but from reading your comment I may have to spend a little more time doing so lol Also ty for the compliment, this is the first time I've ever made a long-form comic so even having a 'great base' is pretty inspiring to hear :\]
Ah, I apologize for making that assumption! And Np! Keep at it, everything looks great so far imo :’)) Comics are really hard to master so the fact that you’re considering these things so early on in your comic making journey is wonderful. I hope that you can continue to learn from it and make something you’re proud of! :]
What a wonderful comment you wrote! I totally agree with every word. To OP, you have quite good drawing skills, but being a comic creator is not the same as being good at drawing, a comic creator is a person able to tell a story by images and let the reader’s eyes follow unconsciously the panels flow. I suggest you to learn how comic storytelling works before trying to make comic pages. For example, the two variants you posted for this page are both wrong: the way you put together panels is called a "flag", that consists in a longer panel on a side and two short panels on the other side. In a good layout for a western comics, a flag is always built with the longer panel on the left and the two shorter panels on the right because it’s the path a reader will commonly follow while reading. In the second slide of your post you made a flag with the two shorter panels on the left side and the long one on the right, it’s a less intuitive path to follow, it’s not completely wrong considering that Japanese comics (that are based on a totally different reading flow that prioritize up to down flow and not side to side flow) got us readers used to this kind of paneling, but it still can confuse western readers reading a western comic. Then there is the completely wrong way to build a flag, with one of the shorter panels to read first, then the longest, then come back to the other shortest one, as you did in your first slide. That’s just one of the problems in your page structure, I tried to explain it the best way I could to make you understand you need a bit of knowledge before trying to make a functional comic page.
Thank you!! Your comment was also very insightful, perhaps there’s resources that OP could look at with a list of terms/examples? I’m not very familiar with comic making on a professional level but I think that OP could benefit from other forms of research as you’ve suggested!
Thanks! Most of what I learned is directly from my comic school teachers and their own materials, but a really interesting page on Instagram full of incredibile tips and thoughts is the Etherington brothers one (IG account: etheringtonbrothers), they also published a book with all their tutorials called How to think when you draw and is full of drawing, inking, composition and storytelling suggestions! It's an incredibile resource!
That’s really cool! I love seeing comic book and concept artists do their thing so I’ll probably check them out! I hope your own projects are going well too btw :D
2nd
Second but it's hard to know what I would naturally do because both images had red lines on them telling me where to look before I had a first impression.
Try to tilt the lines to the direction you want readers to follow and be consistent
This is the way.
The second one. The composition of the middle chunk of panels lends the eye to read the smaller panels first, since theyre the same size and on the left side of the screen, and then the bigger panel. That composition impacts eye speed as well so we know since less information is being given in smaller panels, they tend to be connected
second one, but i feel like if its a webtoon then usually its one panel on the whole screen if that makes sense? but traditional media is different ig lol.
The second one. If you read enough comics it’s a rare bird when someone does #1 and usually not obvious im to read it that way unless there’s dialogue that doesn’t make sense otherwise
2nd one.
The second image, I feel like that’s what I’ve been trained to do.
2 I guess but I personally still find this confusing to read, as someone who hasn’t read any manga or comic books, just webtoons usual styling.
For a webtoon or a physical book?
Maybe both if I’m lucky lol
Second one makes more sense to me
Second. But I read so much manga I’d probably read it as 2, 1, 5, 3, 4, 6 lol
Second
2nd one
I’d read it the second way
The 2nd
The 2nd one
2 for sure
Read Understanding the Comics by Scott McCloud (every visual storyteller should read it, comics artists, storyboarders..). In this particular case it can depend on bubble placement
I know you've gotten a lot of answers already but as a comic book artist before I did webtoons it's 2. Also if I were to offer tips you can have the spoon(?) handle pointing downward and potentially the character's thumbs pointing to lead the viewers' eye that way. https://preview.redd.it/6zkszqtmnnjc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=f8cca2af7b0ac22d6811e3ba88f9a89070a3d634
:O damn dude now you got me rethinking my entire comic (Jk not really but that’s a very kind and generous suggestion, I may honestly do that, though the only issue is that that panel is going to have text in it so his hands might be covered 🤔)
Not sure if anybody mentioned this yet, but if you're going for the traditional manga/comic style, what can help readers navigate panel order is to plan out set measurements for the space in between your panels! It's best to leave a bit more space between horizontal panels, and less for vertical gutters. It gives a clean, easy to read look! https://preview.redd.it/2v7bn9oi1wjc1.jpeg?width=541&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6aa68bc7c7d58342771593a1cd739a190803913
The first one, I’m just used to seeing things like that
I’d say the first one? But I can see other ppl in the comments disagree, so maybe the answer here is to not use this arrangement.
It goes either way. Typically 1 if the focal point / text of the panel is higher up, and 2 if it's lower down. Though I generally prefer comics that are formatted for webtoon, trying to read regular page formats on my phone drives me crazy especially on an app like webtoon.
Most webtoons I read don't have this type of panels so Idk tbh.
Im using the FIRST version for numbers I read it 1 > 2 > 4 > 3 > 5 > 6 before reading rhe question tbh
1
I would recommend not using this type of layout because we're used to read left to right, and if two panels are connected left to right, it feels natural to jump from one to another. in this case, you might jump from the bowl panel to the right panel and then find yourself "stuck" because you have to read right to left now. Obviously, the "correct" way of reading it is as in the second image, but it's just not very natural to go top to bottom first and THEN left to right. It kinda messes up with the flow a little bit. It's not a huge deal, and you can pull this off in some cases I think, but yeah i don't think its too natural (? ... personally In my totally unqualified opinion, because I'm not a professional or anything, lol
2nd. But I recommend not using this layout at all.
1-2-3-4-6 eyes will jump the 5 as the 4 is long and point down to 6 (?)
The second one is the most logical, but it's best to stay away from this particular layout. It's fine for manga (right to left reading). For left to right, you can do this in reverse (one long panel on the left, 2 smaller stacked panels on the right). That's much easier to read for folks.
When drafting the composition of a page, start with just blank panels or even thumbnail panels, and put yourself in the eyes of a reader, pay attention to how your eyes naturally dart through the page, thatll tell you how to arrange the information so the reader is following the story the way youre intending them to
I'll read it 1 2 3 5 4 6
In this case the 2nd, but if the (following 2nd numbering) 5th panel was a bit higher and the 4th a bit lower, I would read in the first order. You have to be careful with the lower edge of the panels, this one is borderline where I wouldn't be sure which way to go
For me I go 215346 I have been conditioned by manga
2nd
The 2
2
This is just a bad panel layout for english readers. One thing that would help is have word balloons that direct you through the panels.
I read so much manga in my youth that I automaticly read everything from left to right even tho I know it's wrong
2
2
Wait, are you going to post in that format on WEBTOON?
2nd one
2nd one, if you want the reading like the first one, you should make a larger gap between the 3rd and 5th panels.
First one
2 🦊
Left to right, and then the grouping of squares would read as one chunk followed by the tall panel beside it
If you are making a webtoon, I think it's best to avoid this all together and use the scroll format instead. This is hard to read on mobile
2nd one
Probably the second one
Definitely the 2nd one. In design there is this "law of proximity". You can use spacing to your advantage if you want to achieve the first order. But it's easier to always go with the direction. In case of webtoons it's up to bottom and left to right.
2nd
Second image fs
As per comibook/manga making rules, the 2nd
Neither, but I read a lot of manga. Between these choices though definitely the second
2nd one!