Talk About Options.....

Once again my reach exceeds my grasp. Doing layouts is more time consuming than I initially realized. It's fun work, but can't be rushed. Take for example the following page of dialog. There are four speakers and six word balloons. (The final cartoon will have six speakers but I grabbed this page at random and am too impatient to find a page that better illustrates my point).


Since eyes scan left to right, top to bottom, Dr. Q is always in upper left hand corner. But there are dozens of variations of how to arrange the other speakers in the panels.


Rather than give four speakers four word balloons (Sample One below), I stretched the text in panels two and three, and four and five, in order to slow down time. The nanosecond it takes for readers to move their eyes from one panel to the next is just enough time to create the illusion of passing time.

SAMPLE ONE

With the magic of Publisher program I can combine panels; Sample Two (below) has been morphed from six to two panels...and I've added several non speaking characters. I'm toying with the idea of having these "extras" tell their own story in pantomime.

SAMPLE TWO

Now notice what happened in Sample Three (below). With a rearranging of word balloon "tails" and linking them I can move speakers around in the panels. Readers see the speakers with their word balloons when I place them to the left of the panel....or readers see the words first and find out later who is doing the speaking when I move speakers to the right.

SAMPLE THREE

These minor details aren't so minor. While I'm not really sure which way is best, my gut tells me to try 'em all and keep readers' attention with variation.

The option to make panels vertical isn't really an option. There are no tall buildings, aerial shots, or flying birds to accommodate. The pictures really are in service of the words and not the other way around. Getting too fancy with the illustrations would, I suspect, detract from the story.