Having drawn Batman and far to many other comics I’ve alway thought comics pages where 6.75 by 10.25, never the right size for getting paper in an art store, the size you draw on translates to 10 by 15 art area and it never every fit right on 14 by 17 pads somehow. But once I moved to the computer my instincts of what fits on a page is driven by comics and I did this layout for the story.
In a small NYC bathroom the mold grows easily if you don’t keep the shower curtain in the right way. So in laying out this story I wanted the four beats in the middle to extend the time as a rhythm Shower time shower time and in a comic page at that size you can play it. But when this page was reduced to manga size it began to feel cramped and the rhythm didn’t have the weight I wanted it to.
So I picked out a Kirby layout, I can’t give up all my history for this new-fangled manga stuff and redid the layout. Only now I hit the how do you do this rhthym in the six panel grid. this is something I’ve hit over and over again if you use 4 panels grided and try to do an alternating rhythm the one and three stack over each other and become a vertical line on the left and the 2 and 4 can easily become a vertical line on the right and it blows the whole damn reading pattern, artistic angst to the max.
But aha I cheated with…
By overlaying the type I turn the whole page into a design and hopefully the traditional right to left reading pattern will force the reader through the pages correctly and end at the screaming. Scanning it makes it into a design but reading it you can follow the proper pattern.
