As the guy in charge of working with our artists as we develop the comics from the scripts, I've learned a lot about the process. My chief goal is to make our comics as easy to follow as possible—I hate reading confusing comics, and likewise I would hate for our comics to accidentally confuse our readers. To that end I've built a sort of a checklist that I use to remember what to look for when the artists submit their pages. Some are important for helping the reader move through a comic comfortably, like easily understanding in what order panels and speech balloons should be read, while others ensure a more analytical reader can piece together the finer details of our stories. Keeping the little things consistent is especially important because when our stories are taken together they form the Carpe Chaos universe and we want the Porgs, Kaeans, Turikasuul, and Xotron to feel as real as possible!

I went through my notes and pulled the best examples I could find to illustrate the sorts of things I pay attention to. The list turned out to be pretty long, so I broke it up into three blog posts. This one is about what I do first: make sure the comics flow well from panel to panel, page to page, and spread to spread. It's important for us to get all this stuff figured out before moving to the finer details, because otherwise we end up going back and changing things and wasting time in the process. I made each image below link to that page in the finished comic, so if you want to see how an example turned out when it was finished, just click the picture.

Jason's Flow Checklist

• Do my eyes follow good lines when the comic is read, without too much zigzagging? Is the panel order at all confusing?

I've found that people who read comics on a regular basis don't often pay attention to how they mentally process each page. They take in each page as naturally as if they were reading a book. But reading comics can be confusing because for a novice because it's not immediately obvious in what order the panels should be read. For stories like Rising Up, the panels are arranged into rows and you can read them from left to right as you would words on a page without any problems. But stories like Jailing Fortune require a more nuanced approach. When do you read to the right? When do you read down? When do you start over again at the next panel on the left?
So making each comic easy to follow is important for several reasons. Good layouts make it more comfortable for experienced readers who get annoyed when their reading rhythm is broken, and they help new readers who might be intimidated or put off by complex panel arrangements. There are a lot of subtleties in guiding a reader through a page in the proper order (and sometimes the order doesn't matter or is left ambiguous on purpose), but my approach is simply to read through the rough layouts and try to sense where something could be confusing.
In the example below, Anthony Cournoyer's first layout design for this page of Filter Dregs confused me. It wasn't obvious whether the center panel should be read second or third, and because the page needed to show a linear sequence of moments it made the whole thing confusing. I explained my confusion by drawing the "right" way to read it in pink, and the more natural but wrong way to read it in dark red. Anthony agreed and after a few revisions we got a layout that was both mildly interesting and (I hope) completely clear.






• Does the panel layout look pleasing and nice? Does anything seem off aesthetically?

This one is pretty subjective, and one of the privileges I enjoy as editor :-). If something looks off, I can request that it be changed. This is in the checklist mostly to remind myself to take a step back and look at the pages for anything that bugs me or triggers my OCD. It's like a comfort-check for me.
I didn't like how the speech balloon in Worst Case Scenario had panels on top of it, so I asked the artist (Daniel Allen) to rearrange his layers.






• Does the action make sense as it is shown? Can I follow it clearly from panel to panel?

In other words, is the action consistent from panel to panel? Can I tell what is happening?
In the first example (Daniel's Rurban Sprawl), I thought the Porg character Helmut looked as though he had materialized with his segway as if he had spawned in a video game. Too sudden! By adding his tentacle, it became clear that he was pushing the segway out from his house or garage.
In the second example, Anthony's Jailing Fortune layout was just too confusing. It was hard to figure out in what order the panels should be read, but more than that it was hard to follow the action after I figured out the panel order.






• Is the correct order of the speech balloons obvious, or is the order confusingly ambiguous?

Like the panel order, I always check to make sure the speech balloons are arranged in way that makes their order easy to figure out. We fixed the problem on this page of Anthony's Filter Dregs by lowering the second and third balloons, and connecting them with a tail.




• Does the pacing feel right?

Making comics is, at the core, the art of creating time with space. The way the panels are laid out, the way the panels are divided, the way the characters are spaced, the way the speech balloons are positioned, really everything everything affects the pace at which a story is interpreted and experienced. Different people can experience the same layout in different ways but certain rules always apply, and then there are the finer details beyond those. For example, more panels means time moves slower. Fewer panels means time moves faster. Larger panels cause me to pause, while I move through many smaller panels more quickly. The more words on a page, the longer it takes to get through it. And so on.
I pay the most attention to how the dialog comes across. I want to make sure the beats in conversations are communicated well, because I think about the tempo and emphasis when I work on the scripts and I don't want to lose those considerations when the comic is drawn. I wrote the bulk of Hard Lessons, and in the example below I asked Anthony to divide the panels because I wanted a pause between when the younger Turikasuul finished his lame argument and when the general reacted to it. I wanted to give the general's muttering its own beat or tick or moment in time; I wanted to give her "face-palm moment" more weight.






• Do the panels that begin and end pages carry appropriate weight? Would rearranging the page divisions improve readability or "set the stage" better?

We present our comics in digital books two pages at a time, so I think about how the stories will be presented when they're live on the site (and printed in books). Page divisions, either between two pages of the same spread or more importantly between page turnings, affect how the story is physically framed and what can be seen side-by-side. It's generally a bad idea to split a sequence of moment-to-moment or action-to-action panels across multiple pages, because they are read quickly and sometimes need to be next to one another to be clear. There's also page density to consider: sometimes not enough happens on a page, and sometimes a page is too cramped.
When we started on Door to Door (and when we thought it would only be a few pages long), Joe Slucher's initial layout put the number of actual comic pages at four. Because it's a solemn, somber story, and because the setting changes several times, doing everything in only four pages felt too quick. While it took longer to finish because we added another page, the five-page sequence felt like it was paced much better and each page felt like an even fifth of the story.






• Is it easy to become disoriented between panels due to camera angle changes? Is the 180° rule broken in ways that create confusion? Is a general orientation maintained throughout a scene, and if not, is that okay?

The 180°rule is more of a guideline, but it says that if you rotate the camera (point of view) around a scene too much and the characters and objects swap places as a result of the changes, the comic (or motion picture for that matter) can become confusing. The way you can make sure not to do anything too confusing is to draw an imaginary line through the middle point of a scene, and then draw all of the panels in that scene from the same side of that line, never moving the camera (point of view) across it. Of course you can break this rule without running into problems, but you have to pay attention to make sure you aren't going to confuse the reader's sense of left and right.
On the first page of Moments of Elation, I wasn't sure that everything was in the same position because the camera moved so much. Anthony drew a diagram to show he hadn't broken the 180° rule, which you can see below, and that about convinced me. This story was a little special because it takes place in a zero-g environment and the camera was moving along all 3 axes, and the sense of disorientation was not entirely a bad thing. We wanted the first page to convey a sense of zero-g, which is inherently disorienting :-).

The second part of my checklist has to do with words, speech balloon layout, and typesetting. So look forward to that ;-)

-Jason