20 Rules for Better Comics
It bugs me that, with a few exceptions aside, the humble critic has yet to come to comics. I’d like to see a greater appreciation for comics as both a craft and an art form. But even more so, I think that storytellers in comics sometimes need a good kick in the ass. Perhaps if that ball is going to get rolling, I’d better step up and figure out what I personally think is good and bad in the realm of comics. A list of principles—rules, if you will.
Be warned! At 2,441 words, this is going to be an epic length excursion into the guts of the comics medium. It will explore things that can be done to good effect. It will explore mistakes that are made all too often, sometimes by comics’ brightest stars. I really hope it will explore ways for writers and artists to achieve an improvement in their own work.
Prepare to become a better storyteller!
1. Choose your format wisely.
Is the finished artwork going to be on 6×9 paper? Horizontal 14×11 paper? A computer screen? Make sure that the needs of your story are in tune with the format you’re working in.
There is most definitely a common format, but by no means is it automatically the best for what you’re doing.
Don’t be afraid to experiment!
2. Sound in comics has severe limitations. Or, off-panel voices don’t work.
A dialogue balloon comes in from an unknown source beyond the edge of the panel. Is it a man’s voice? A woman’s voice? Is it coming from an old person or a young person? If it’s off-panel, who knows? Remember, the readers are supposed to be hearing this in their heads!
Never keep your audience from knowing what a voice should sound like. It might be mysterious, but it’s also cheating. Dialogue balloons stand in for real sound. If you can see the dialogue on the page, you should be able to “hear” it.
3. Time in comics has severe limitations. Or, one panel cannot represent multiple lengths of time.
Comics can’t outright show the passage of time, so be as careful as possible when implying it. If you have both an action sequence and a bunch of expositional dialogue to get through, find a better solution than just cramming them together.
Say that one of your characters is punching another character in the jaw. If the panel is supposed to be showing the hit, then the hit is controlling how long the panel lasts. If the panel is supposed to be showing dialogue, then the dialogue is controlling how long the panel lasts.
Of course, you see the problem. Punching is fairly instantaneous. Dialogue is not. They can’t be included in the same panel without screwing up the panel’s sense of duration. This can be thought of as the “Jeph Loeb makes superheroes talk too much while they fight” rule.
4. Use color with deliberate purpose, or not at all.
Color for the sake of color is a marketing tool at best, and an intrusion upon the visual design of the story at worst. Know why you’re using it.
Avoid the shiny, airbrushed, gradiated, heavily filtered coloring often seen in today’s mainstream comics. It’s sterile and artificial-looking. Colorists ought to be proud when their work looks like it came primarily from the hand of a human being, rather than a computer.
Don’t be afraid of black and white.
5. Don’t rely too heavily on text.
Let the readers discover your world visually. Let it unfold for them. It will be much more “real” than if it’s explained through captions.
Use subtext and physical action to hint at what your characters are thinking! Many comic book characters express themselves just by grimacing and balling up their fists. Real people have a much broader range of expression than that.
Don’t overload the page with text. It makes for an ugly page. Once upon a time, former DC Comics editor Mort Weisinger decided that 210 is the maximum number of words that one page can support. How he came up with that figure is a mystery to me, but it seems pretty spot-on.
6. Choose wisely, when to break from the panel you’re in and advance to the next one!
Tell your story in as few well-chosen, well-composed images as you can. Fragmented visuals are a sign that the author and artist are imposing too much of their own voice upon the material. Let the readers form their own experience, rather than forming it for them.
Give your readers enough detail to visualize the complete environment. A strong grasp of the geography (this word will pop up again in a little while) is essential for the reader to make visual sense of what’s going on.
More lines in your drawings do not mean more detail. This means you, Jim Lee!
7. Avoid talking heads.
If two characters are talking to each other, let them be seen together! Draw them in “two-shots,” and use as few panels as possible. If you find yourself needing a long chain of close-ups to get the whole conversation in, trim your dialogue first.
In fact, don’t use close-ups at all unless you need to reveal something in the character’s face. That’s what close-ups are for.
8. Work from the human level.
Don’t go for flashy visual angles unless they somehow make sense within the story. If your two characters are calmly dining in a restaurant, keep us in the room and keep us at eye level. Leave the fancy angles out of it.
9. Be mindful of the axis of action.
As I’ve said, your drawings should be creating a sense of geography—in other words, the physical space of the story—in the reader’s mind.
If the geography is going to make sense, the placement of characters and objects needs to be consistent. This is best accomplished by keeping them in the same left-to-right visual arrangement from panel to panel. Their positioning will feel much more consistent this way.
This visual arrangement is sacred! Stray from it only in two circumstances: one, the scene ends, or two, a new viewing angle has been clearly established.
10. When it comes to the era, keep it real.
Either tell the story here and now, or do good research to create the time and place that it does happen. Don’t use stereotypes or clichés to create the illusion of an exotic setting. That’s cheating.
11. When it comes to environments, continue to keep it real.
If a scene takes place in a bedroom, the bedroom should have the things that a real bedroom would have. The same goes for a kitchen, a living room, a dining hall, a snowy field, a desert, or a verdant forest.
If your environment has a foreign item in it—that is, anything that wouldn’t commonly be there—your story must include a plausible explanation for how it got there and why. A gun taped to the bottom of a table, a chest buried in the yard, or whatever.
This could even extend to special knowledge possessed by a character. Unless your characters are all-knowing and all-powerful, they should never miraculously be able pull the right item or right bit of information out of thin air in the nick of time.
12. If it looks like it violates the laws of physics, don’t use it.
If your character clearly kicks a ball forward in one panel and it is seen rocketing straight up into the sky in the next, something is wrong. If your character punches a boulder and the boulder reacts as though it’s made of rubber rather than stone, something is really wrong.
Get rid of this stuff. If your story depends on it in order to work, go back as many steps as it takes to fix it.
Of course, this assumes that your story’s universe is consistent with real world physics. If not, then any differences from reality must be carefully established early on. And, once established, your story must never stray from its own version of physics.
13. Come up with something better than a villain who exists solely to oppose the hero.
Unless you’re going to explore the hero’s grief when he realizes that his actions led directly to the existence of a violent monster—and trust me, it’s been done—you’re only going to make him look stupid, impotent, and irresponsible.
14. Avoid telling stories with “quote marks” around them.
The comics medium is so choked with parodies, alternative takes, ironic takes, and other post-modern dickery that the original stories are starting to lose out.
Learn to tell sincere, original stories first, because you need to know what something is before you can even attempt to subvert it. There’s a fine line between clever and obnoxious—and when the authors know and even enjoy what they’re playing with, it makes all the difference.
Note: “sincere” and “original” do not necessarily mean serious! There is such a thing as sincere comedy, just as there is such a thing as ironic tragedy.
15. Ambiguity is good. Deliberately confusing your audience is not.
Ambiguity means that there are a variety of valid, interesting ways that your story can be looked at. A muddled, nonsensical story doesn’t count as ambiguous. Not that meaning can’t be found in muddled nonsense, but in that case, the audience deserves the credit—not you.
16. Female wardrobe is not an opportunity to pander to young male readers.
I realize that mainstream comics are primarily read by teenage boys and adult men, and that most of those comics involve superheroes—and superheroines. If you insist on perpetuating the dominance that this genre unfairly has over all others, this rule is especially for you.
Please, please—at least pretend that your female characters are proud and emotionally secure when you’re designing their costumes. Also try to remember that while your female characters might be able to defy gravity, the costumes probably can’t.
While you’re at it, you might also pretend that your superheroine would probably opt for clothes that protect her skin, rather than expose as much of it as possible.
17. Don’t sanitize violence.
If you’re going to let your characters fight, then show what would happen if they fought. Blood. Broken bones. Severe wounds, perhaps. If the nature of your story doesn’t allow this, then it doesn’t allow the violence.
However, don’t amp up the violence to exaggerated levels, either. This isolates the reader with a layer of fantasy, which is its own sort of sanitation.
18. Storytelling is a moral activity.
Remember the thing about imposing your voice upon the readers’ experience? Your readers have a right to explore the images without you dragging them around with selective, constrictive page layouts. When in doubt, always err on the side of giving the readers more freedom.
How much you control the reader’s experience is a matter of story as well. Don’t be too restrictive in how the story can be judged, and do not, DO NOT impose your overarching interpretation upon the reader! Never be too on-the-nose with what you think it all means.
The amount of freedom you give to your readers, in any aspect of your comic, is an important moral decision.
19. Everything in your comic matters.
Every panel composition, every page layout, every character design, and every line of dialogue has its own little bit of influence upon how your story will come across. Be careful of your decisions!
The reader can and probably will notice careless decisions and overlooked mistakes. And even if they don’t, their experience of the work will still be negatively impacted. Assuming you’re good enough to weave a spell over your audience, it’s all too easy for that spell to be broken.
And finally, the big Kahuna…
20. Never use what is overused.
The following are signs that your story is on autopilot:
• Romantic complications that occur because one character cuts off the other’s explanation and nobody ever bothers to clear things up.
• Horror stories that only move forward because somebody does something unreasonably stupid.
• Superficial, unlikely action of any kind—weapons, murders, drugs, whatever. Most of us will never kill anybody, be murdered, or be involved in a shootout in a warehouse full of heroin. And yet, our lives certainly don’t lack stories that are worth telling.
• Directionless stories about quirky outsiders and their unlikely friendships.
• Revenge plots.
• Wealthy criminal masterminds who issue orders while sitting in the shadow of a really tall chair.
• Impossible-to-kill characters that fall down, apparently dead, but rise back to their feet after a moment. Or—for the Dragon Ball fans—characters that apparently die, but emerge unscathed from a cloud of dust and dirt.
• Common turns of phrase, especially in dialogue. (“I’m not a terrorist—I’m a patriot!” “She died of a broken heart.” “We’ll meet again, Spider-Man!”)
• Characters that are capable of coming up with a perfect Seinfeldian one-liner for any situation.
• Out-of-the-box slice-of-life woe-is-me self-indulgent masturbatory sub-cultural award-baiting psychosexual pseudo-intellectual coming-of-age generic pre-fab shopping-list anything.
• Stories in which the main problem is that the hero and the villain haven’t fought yet, and the solution is that they do.
• Gunfire scenes in which nobody hits anything or anyone unless it’s convenient to the plot. Also known as the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship.
• Exotic, elaborate forms of assassination that could just as easily be accomplished with a single gunshot. Also known as the Dr. Evil School of Supervillainy.
• Final showdowns that occur in a factory with showers of sparks everywhere, or in a completely deserted area with lots of smashable scenery.
• Final showdowns that occur in densely populated areas, completely glossing over the high number of casualties that would necessarily occur.
• Really, any story in which the conflict is resolved through prolonged physical combat of any kind—fire arms, kung fu, whatever. If you’re such a great writer, is that the best you can do?
This is usually the part where you’d expect me to say that rules are meant to be broken, or something equally trite. But that’s not going to happen here. You may think you have an awesome reason to violate these principles. I assure you, though, that you do not. You need these limitations. They will give your stories a fighting chance at some kind of ingenuity.
Seriously, no excuses. Don’t phone it in. Don’t slack off. Don’t put your story on autopilot. Be a good storyteller.