Panel Layout Quotes

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

I thought about trying to do a strip. I even tried to do it, but I felt I didn't have the voice. Even though I liked that form, I didn't think I thought in the form of the three panels.

If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel.

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

I love the interplay between words and pictures. I love the fact that in comics, your pictures are acting like words, presenting themselves to be read.

I didn't know how to write comics. I had to teach myself.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

I don't think of myself as having any freedom when it comes to how 'Monstress' is structured and how the story is going because a comic book has to be even more tightly structured than a novel, because there is no room for mistakes. Once the art is done, the art is done.

With things like 'Dragon Ball,' in the case of fight scenes, I'd take the panel layout across two pages when the book is opened and alter it by angling them, and making them bigger or smaller, to give movement to the panels themselves.

If you want to draw comics, you really have to love to draw, as you will be spending many hours sitting down with a pencil or pen in your hand.

So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another - or in focused spaces where 'the camera' has to stay in pretty close on what's going on.

I don't write fight scenes in comics all that well. I think they're a waste of space unless they can move a story forward in some compelling fashion. You've only got twenty-two pages to work with. Why throw that away on a set of meaningless punches?

Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.

Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.

I didn't read many comics as a kid - I've always been a really fast reader, and I would fly through a comic book in a few minutes and be so mad that it ended so quickly. But now that I've been in the business, I tend to look at the panels so much more carefully, and realize that so much of it is about the art; I don't think I got that before.

When I'm writing comics, I'm also visualizing how the story will look on the page - not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.

In comics, there are depths that don't reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about 'Watching the Watchmen' - like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air - might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

I grew up really into comic books, and I actually thought I was going to be a comic-book artist. That was my ambition before I realized I couldn't keep characters looking the same from panel to panel.

All through my comics career, I was always trying to reinvent the form.

I just really respond to comics. I find it a really exciting medium.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

I love graphic novels - I love reading them, I enjoyed writing them, I would love to go back and do them again. I hope I'm savvy enough to do them in the right way.