Planning Your 12-page Comic Book

May 15, 2023 Planning Your 12-page Comic Book

If you have three pieces of paper, you can make a twelve-page comic:

If that schematic is confusing, start with this one:

These are slides I made for the most recent iteration of my and Leigh Ann Beavers’ ENGL-ARTS 215: Making Comics class. I never lecture in any of my other classes (they’re all discussion-based seminars), but our comics course is closer to a lab: we explain a bunch of stuff, and then our students apply the concepts hands-on.

This presentation was titled “Multiple Pages” and followed homework reading “Chapter 4: Pages” in our textbook Creating Comics. It also followed the previous day’s presentation “Layout & Paths” (which I recently updated here). I’m also comics editor at Shenandoah, which we’ve been using as our online anthology.

The first question to ask when planning your own comic: will your pages follow the same layout?

Check out Rainie Oet and Alice Blank’s Wanting to Erase Her Share of the Darkness for an example of a five-page comic that never varies from a regular 3×3 grid:

Coyote Shook’s seven-page The Gospel According to Opal Foxx follows a regular 2-panel column — until the final page switches to three panels. I call that a “page accent” — a way of giving certain story content greater emphasis by breaking from an established layout pattern:

Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s eight-page Unfished Unfinished does something similar. The irregular 2×3 begins to breakdown on the sixth page:

Taku Ward’s six-page A Cheeseburger Sushi’s Experience instead varies every layout — though with a full-width panel starting each page, including the final full-page:

Fabio Lastrucci’s five-page From the Garden varies every layout with no repeated similarities:

Marguerite Dabaie’s twelve-page excerpt from her work-in-progress The Silk Road reveals all kinds of connections: pages 3 and 5 both use regular two-panel columns; pages 2, 6, and 7 are variations on a 2×2 grid; pages 3, 8, and 12 feature full-page images with ending (and usually opening) insets. I term those kinds of layout repetitions “page rhymes”:

Miriam Libicki’s 14-page excerpt from her work-in-progress Glasnost Kids instead reveals “page phrases”: consecutive pages grouped as a unit. The first five are connected by her green penciling; the next five emphasize red; the penultimate pair create a dark woodblock effect; and the final pair break the z-path rows with n-path columns.

We include a couple of examples in Creating Comics too, including a former student’s:

I term that a “page scheme” because it looks like a poem’s rhyme scheme: AB CD CD CD BA. The example also emphasizes the importance of paired paged. Unlike all of the above online comics, the physical twelve-page comics our students make are defined by two-page spreads:

That means that instead of thinking in terms of single pages, you need to have pairs in mind. I used my own own work-in-progress for an example. The layouts are the same for each pair, but vary between pairs:

Some use the gutter to create a mirror effect:

When planning, note that one 2-page spread stands apart. The middle is also the centerfold:

Middle positions are an important concept generally, but here the key difference is physical. Pages 5 and 6 are the only paired pages that share a side of a piece of paper. That means the two pages can be drawn as a single image. You can create a similar effect with other spreads, but the middle gutter will be a challenge when you combine pages in the physical comic book:

The next part of the class presentation focused on combining narrative sequences with page breaks, which I hope to return to later here too.

Meanwhile, we enter Week 4 of our four-week spring term today, and our students are done listening to me lecture and are focused on finalizing their pages by Thursday.