With this instalment of IndieView, I wanted to cover some of the theory behind comics. Now, I’m not going to pretend I’ve got anything on the likes of Scott McCloud, but I do have a couple of valid points worth mentioning. And hey, it’s free.

Comics have always had a strange relationship with the term of “art”, or “serious art”. It’s not hard to convince people certain novels are “serious art”, and it’s not hard to do the same with certain films. However, there are only a handful of examples within the comic medium. There are a lot of reasons for this that deserve much more time and attention than I’m going to give here, so I’ll skip over that for now. However, for the most part, comics today aren’t “serious art”.

One of the main reasons I see in most mainstream US comics is the writing, and making the writing suit a comic. With mainstream US on-going titles, you have deadlines and so don’t necessarily have the time to completely perfect the writing. In UK indie comics however, you aren’t stuck with any publisher’s deadline, far from it. What I aim to do with this column is throw a few ideas and questions and thoughts to you, the reader, to hopefully give you some ideas and raise some questions to help further your writing. I in no way aim t preach or tell you how to do anything; I merely want to pose some suggestions and ideas.

The main thing is working to the strengths of comics. There are certain stories that will lend themselves particularly well to the medium in the first place but that doesn’t mean that certain story types and genres should be excluded. Anything can work to comic form if you craft the scenes correctly.

The strengths of the comic form are its mixture of language and visuals. In cinema you have moving images and in novels you have words, phrases, sentences. At first glance you are taking a simplified version of each of those two forms – a snapshot image and a small amount of text. What it allows you to do is something that you can’t capture as well in a film or without it being pretty obvious in a novel. Comics allow for a lot of symbolism and descriptive images and the words can be used to back-up and reinforce ideas present through the imagery, or vice-versa. It can be done in an obvious way, for example an image of a dog with writing describing the dog’s characteristics etc. Or it can be in a less obvious, but symbolic way (think the opening page of Watchmen, with Rorschach’s diary complementing the visuals presented, but without actually blatantly commenting on the visuals themselves).

Another strength is purely the single sequential shots of imagery. You are given much more freedom than in film to set-up scenes and angles to get exactly what you need. You can break the rules of physics in placing shots and have any character in any position. You have free reign on the imagery you are giving, with no bounds. It’s something that is exploiting in one form in film, but here it has even more of an advantage.

A comic is not dynamic.

What I mean by this is when you turn the page, the previous page still exists – just turn the page back. There’s no set structure to reading a comic. You can go back 10 pages and re-read, or check a panel from the last page. In film you are stuck with the pacing the director has set. This really hampers some storytelling in film and television (a notable example being the first episode of the TV show The Wire, where at the end of the episode there is a flashback to the beginning, to show the link between beginning and end). With a comic, the reader has the freedom to go back themselves and check what happened and the start, middle or wherever without ruining the pace by showing a flashback to an earlier panel. It also allows for a many-layered story to become unravelled upon further stories. Leaving visual symbols and written symbolic language means once a reader has read the story and appreciated the plot and its themes, a subsequent read will show more depth as they understand some of the things that they may have possibly missed on the first read. This is something that has an advantage over film.

One thing that many writers tend to ignore is pacing in a comic. While it’s true that it is hard to perfectly pace a comic because of how a reader will read it (their own reading speed, etc.), pacing is still very important. A reader will spend on average a couple of seconds viewing a panel’s artwork, and anywhere from 3-8 seconds (from personal experience and a bit of research) reading one caption/speech bubble. That’s just under a minute a page for a standard 6 panel page. Using that as a guide (you may want to do a bit of research with some of your current readers as to their habits, too) you can figure out how to pace a comic. Decreasing panels, decreasing the amount of detail drawn into a panel etc. will all shorten the length of time taken on that panel. You can also increase the time by drawing a more detailed panel, adding more panels per page or increasing the words on a page.

On the subject of captions, I’ve read that it’s best to stick to around 24-26 words per caption/speech bubble, with no more than about 36-40 words per panel on a standard 6 panel page. This gives you about 240 words to play with on a US sized comic page for a suitable reading experience. I’ve read a few comics recently that have gone way over this, and it’s uncomfortable and tiresome to read that many words of dialogue. It’s obvious something is wrong if you’re fitting whole paragraphs into each panel on a 6 panel page. If you’re working in A5, you’d want to drop this number to around 200-220 words per page.

Now working with pages is a problem that many people don’t take into account. To get a successful and immersive story going is one thing but you need to keep it going. Turning a comic page ruins that experience. As a reader getting into a comic, turning the page just reinforces the idea that this is a comic and not a real world – so you have to work around it. You can use a page end as the end of a scene, turning over the page leads to the next scene. To help the flow going you can do a couple of tricks. One is to have the next scene’s dialogue in a caption of the final panel of the current scene. So as the reader is turning the page, they are already into the next scene, so turning the page just carries on as part of the story.

There’s so much more to go into with this, and I’ve only scratched the surface here – if that. Hopefully there are a few ideas here that you can take with you and consider when writing your next comic story.

As always send any feedback my way by emailing me This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or leaving a comment after the article.

- Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

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