How do I tell if a comic has good paneling?

How do I tell if a comic has good paneling?
I oftentimes hear people talk about the "flow", but I don't quite get what they mean.

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if you can keep up with it and not get confused by the order of the panles the paneling is good

The whole strip is build around this particular idea of paneling so it works.
However it's not very clear and would be tiring for the eyes if it was used over many pages.

now post the while thing, I wanna be disgusted.

Just go read some fucking manga.

Does the paneling convey what the story sets out to do? If the scene is sad, does it play with your emotions, if it's a fast-paced fight scene, do the panels flow well into the next ones, and so on.

You could make 6 generic square boxes in each page, and it'd be terribly bland while also failing to convey anything interesting.

>You could make 6 generic square boxes in each page, and it'd be terribly bland while also failing to convey anything interesting.
This is why it's hard for me to get into 4koma. The paneling is pretty boring. I understand that it's a formula more than a flow of a story but I don't think I've ever finished a 4koma even when I enjoyed the anime it was adapted from.

A good 4koma will usually have a good rhythm going for it. It might even be the most important part since comedy is all about timing, but like you said it's still really restricting and I find myself liking their anime adaptation better.

If it follows the 180 degree rules

Akira Toriyama is a good example of good action flow. He always has full control over the pace of his manga. Normally, he uses a lot of in-between panels to make it clear what's going on, but intentionally cuts them out entirely when he wants the action to look particularly fast. Everyone jobbing to 17 and 18 for the first time is a great example. A whole lot of shit happens, but there's so little transition between any of it that it makes the scene look like the entire fight was finished within a few seconds. Once the fight finishes, it suddenly goes back to using a lot of in-between panels of the Androids turning to face whoever they're about to talk to and stuff.

You wouldn't know it from the anime, but the DBZ manga's action scenes were pretty masterful near the end.

That's like asking: 'how do I know if this food tastes good?'
It's something natural, you should notice if it's bad.

If you don't notice it, it's good.
Read a few American Superhero comics to get some bad paneling.
Other aspects that play together with this, is how you position the actors and where they look, speech bubbles and so on. Does it all work together to lead your eyes along or do they work against each other?
Is, for example, the paneling and position of the characters leading you one way, but the text bubbles require you to move your eyes the other way?
Good photography follows similar "rules" (or rather creative thought processes) , in case you can't find any resources about comics online.

This.
>near the end
He was better in the early arcs. I think he peaked at Goku vs Cell. Lots of shit going on, lots of movement that feels perfectly natural while impressive and superhuman.

Goku vs Kid Buu was great too, though.

This is one of my favorite pages

The square panels might feel a bit bland but the transition between 3 and 4 is great.
But the best page of this fight is when Vegeta punches the air while Goku uses his momentum to jump over him, do a flip and come back.

Damn that's nice

>He was better in the early arcs
>I think he peaked at Goku vs Cell
The Cell saga itself is way closer to the end of the manga than the beginning.

Another factor: How unambiguous is the order of panels? Could something be read both ways (if you imagine the panels to be empty) or does the sectioning and width between panels make it clear which order to read them in?
Wide or long panels can be used to set the scene, multiple identical panels might be used to focus on the difference or same-ness of something (for example a change of facial expression).

I would suggest to read Tezuka's Phoenix. It has a lot of very obvious paneling -
sometimes it even feels a little over-constructed. But if you read it with the intent of learning something about paneling, it can be very insightful. Not to mention that it's a really good manga.


There are also a lot of different styles of paneling, depending on the author as well as the genre.
Action stories like Toriyama's stuff can be very dynamic, while Shintaro Kago uses a very clean, static style (unless he plays with paneling itself as in OP's picture). I think it fits very well with his ridiculous content. By being very neutral and static, the focus is put on the content. This neutral paneling frames the content in an almost clinical context, making it seem even more strange and unnatural.

You need to read bad manga. No one learns to appreciate good paneling by only reading good examples of it.

Yes, but the Cell arc was overall weaker than the others in terms of fighting choregraphy to me, Goku vs Cell being an exception.
The fights that impressed me the most were the 22nd tournament, Goku vs Piccolo Daimao, the Saiyans, most of Namek and one or two fights in the Cell and Buu arcs like Vegeta vs Cell (still remember that flying kick), Goku vs Cell and some of the Buu fights especially with the bubble gum gimmick

Toriyama always emphasized clarity above everything else, so he almost exclusively used square panels. It gave the manga a very bare-bones feel that usually worked in its favor.

Question: how do you deal with the fact that you're missing out on at least 50% of the paneling when you read manga in one-page format on you computer, tablet, online, etc.? Really good paneling doesn't just create flow between panels on one page, it also creates flow between the pages themselves. Well-done, it can effectively turn discontiguous imagery into a two-page spread, but that is almost never picked up on by the scanlators. You can alleviate this a bit by using two-page mode in manga readers, but it's still hard to keep track because the scanlators often leave out blank pages, change up the numbering on spreads, and so on.
Do you pretty much have to buy the physical manga to get the real experience?

If it looks like this I'll consider it good paneling.
If it's just perfect squares and rectangles neatly arranged together I wouldn't call it particularly good. Most artists already do that. If you want it to be good it needs to be ingenious and stand out. You open any page of this author's manga and the first thing you notice is the unique paneling.

Use two-up view?

>If it looks like this I'll consider it good paneling.
>If it's just perfect squares and rectangles neatly arranged together I wouldn't call it particularly good. Most artists already do that. If you want it to be good it needs to be ingenious and stand out.
Unique and good are not the same thing, and paneling is not about making cool shapes.

>you're missing out on at least 50% of the paneling when you read manga in one-page format
>at least 50%
I haven't really thought about this before, and it's a good observation, but I think you're exaggerating immensely. The number of pages that use layouts like that is way less than 50%, and every second page would require you to turn the page anyway, plus things like that are way less than 50% of the paneling on the page to begin with. I'd be more concerned about missing transitions, honestly (the final panel on the right-hand page leading your eye left and up, for example), but even that's fairly minor overall.

>Do you pretty much have to buy the physical manga to get the real experience
Pretty much every image viewer has a two page and manga-view option.

I'm personally not a big fan of two pages mode. It's okay on paper, not too great on a screen, for some reason, maybe because I usually end up spoiling myself the next page. I don't think I'm missing out much here.

Is this a joke?
Good panelling isn't just about how you arrange some boxes. The paneling can be simple, its the composition of whats in them, placement of text and how it all flows as you read through them thats what matters

>If you want it to be good it needs to be ingenious and stand out
I disagree. The paneling isn't only a part of your style it's also a tool for the reader to follow the story. There's a reason paneling is usually done in a certain way. It needs to be compatible with human visual perception and how reading works.

That's not to say that you can't play with it, break the rules or purposely do something irritating with it. But saying that it needs to stand out to be good is ridiculous.

It sets the context of the panel content and sometimes the best solution is neutral boxes.
In either case, the actual panels are just one aspect, and you need to consider the content, how you structure your scene, which view to use, etc just as well.

The panels need to _work together_ with the contents, not be interesting on their own.

I agree with this guy.

You're just trying to piss people off.

Yeah I mentioned two-page view (it's how I prefer to read manga on PC), but you really have to kind of guess which page goes on the right (odd or even), and again, scanlators have a tendency to switch up the order when there are interruptions in the normal page flow.

I agree it depends on the context, but I think really sophisticated paneling does go across both pages a lot. I posted a YKK snapshot because it's a manga that's full of schemes that go across both pages. It could be 10%, it could be 20%, but I think the point still stands that most people who read scans are getting a really abridged experience of the manga.

I'm not talking about making cool shapes, I'm talking about using the panels in a creative way to bring life and atmosphere into the story.

I just don't find any visual appeal in normally arranged square boxes. I think having good flow and good paneling are different things, since the story can have good flow well even if you have simple square panels.
This is just my personal opinion, I won't praise the paneling unless it stands out to me. I see normal squares every day in pretty much everything I read, so unless it's different I won't think much of it or even notice it.

> I'm talking about using the panels in a creative way to bring life and atmosphere into the story
Which has basically nothing to do with whether they're squares or not.

>I think having good flow and good paneling are different things, since the story can have good flow well even if you have simple square panels.
What the fuck? You aren't even going to try to support that or connect those two things? What the hell does "you can have good flow with square panels" have to do with whether flow is part of paneling? The use of panels, square or not, in an organized manner to guide the reader and affect the reception of the content is absolutely part of paneling. That's the main goddamn goal, I would argue.

>so unless it's different I won't think much of it or even notice it.
Then it does its job very well and certainly deserves the adjective "good".
Granted, practically every manga has at least decent paneling, so I can understand why you'd try to reserve that category for few.

...

Why can't comics into good paneling?

This one seems okay if only because it's short. It gets bad in long conversations or during fights

I don't know, go ask Sup Forums. This is the manga board.

cause you're reading comics with bad paneling

That artist's labyrinth shorts always make my rock dick hard.
Anyone remember the one I meant?

...

Please don't use Hayakawa's works as an example for your bad argument.
It doesn't matter what the panels are like, as long as the story flows properly and conveys what it tries to do. Plain, regular boxes work just as well and in a properly composed work you rarely even notice the fact that the panels are so simple. There's also hits and misses when it comes to unique paneling, sometimes it becomes too confusing if the author hasn't properly thought out how the page actually reads out as opposed to just looking cool.

That's panel fetishism, most of us will be happy as long as it does its job.

you are dumb

It was Iku Musume

Ika

If it flows properly and conveys what it tries to do then good, but I wouldn't go out of my way to point it out or think it's particularly good. After all I see that every day in almost every other series I read. That's all.

> If it flows properly and conveys what it tries to do then good
That's what it's all about, though.

The sword is literally interrupting the dialogue.

That's actually pretty clever.

I love stuff like that. Though in this case, it is interrupting the narration.

My first thought was that scene from Terraformars. Especially in a series where fights take a minor pause to breakdown different facts that page was really well done and unexpected.

Everyone here posted examples of what they call good paneling, but what are examples of bad paneling?

good comic

Nanoha Forces.
Every fight scene is a bunch of mid shots followed by the same uninspired close up. It's really lacking.

>If you don't notice it, it's good.
True. Or, if you realize that the paneling makes the story flow, that's also awesome.
It's Sup Forums but look at late Calvin and Hobbes Sunday comics for examples of how paneling can add to the dtory.

Murata is better desu

youtu.be/jJK7oysHoMw?t=590

Damnit, I loved love roma so gosh darn mich

I've heard of "deconstructing comics" but this is ridiculous!

This is mid tier analysis.
>Git gud
Or are you one of those "c'mon turn your brain off and just relaaax my dude gfahgfahgfah"?

If you don't notice it it's probably good. Outside of that there's some creative panel usage too.

Poor paneling gets really obvious with hentai, some artists fill the pages up into a cluttered mess for no reason.

This seems like a good place to ask this question.
Usually when you buy translated manga they are sold as the thick large copies.
But the Japanese can get smaller thinner manga books. Does the layout change in these smaller sized books?

I've read a lot of physical and digital manga and it doesn't really matter that much. And, like others have said, two page mode exists.

It was kind of a joke. Like they're literally deconstructing the comic panels with the weird cross sections. I didn't mean anything more then that.

Check out Hitomi-sensei. Shake-O does some amazing shit.

Just open any shoujo magazine, like Ribbon or something. I still don't understand what's the deal with shoujo and this kind of clusterfuck of a paneling.

Then why read manga? Most of it is basic. Go to a modern art gallery or something.

Fuck I love this artist and Vector Spectacle so much

Good paneling won't stand out.

user was trying to make a bad pun. He failed.

Hox has an article on this with examples of both.

>If it's just perfect squares and rectangles neatly arranged together
This is how the majority of Western comics do things, and the readers seem happy enough.

I too was riffing but I just sounded like an asshole I guess.

Paneling is serious business though.

"Flow" is often brought up, because it's the easiest to understand and explain. Basically it's leading the eye of the reader through a smooth, fluid path using mostly the positioning of panels and speech bubbles, sometimes with character placement, poses and background composition as well. Its positive influence tends to be overestimated by people on Sup Forums who do know what it's about, however when the flow is bad, even an untrained eye will notice it. I don't have an example of it at hand, but if you ask around on Sup Forums, someone might eventually show you one.

There is some basic stuff like the size of the panels - the bigger the panel, the more your readers will focus on it, so use it to show something important, whatever that may be on your page. If you look at the right page of , you can see Alpha tries the coffee at a steady pace, then there's a bit longer stop at her contemplating the taste and finally, the biggest focus is on her being satisfied with it, with a short additional panel with a zoom out at the end to drive the point. It's a very neatly constructed page for a very mundane activity.

Manga uses different speech bubble sizes as well, varying fonts quite a lot to emphasize the importance of a given fragment of dialogue. This is somewhat lost in scanlations as typesetters usually won't bother with different text sizes. It's a pity, because you can manipulate the feeling of a panel and a page with that too, e.g. a small text in a big speech bubble will read differently from a big text in an equally big speech bubble. There's no similar variety in western comics, though some stuff like loud shouting will be emphasized there, most of the time. On the other hand American comics really like their bold and italic fonts to mark certain words of interest in a sentence rather than highlighting the whole speech bubble (Japanese would probably break the speech bubble into parts and modify one of the new parts instead).

cont.

Quite a lot of stuff carries over from cinema (I'm not saying "anime" because anime at its roots looked a whole lot at Hollywood in the first place). Since movies don't have the luxury of changing the size of the screen at their leisure, they have to manipulate the mood of a scene with various different angles, shots and levels of zoom. There are directors who are literally known for some techniques they used, like the spaghetti western king Sergio Leone and his extreme close ups on eyes. Studying movies known for their direction and camera work is a genuinely good practice - you should always learn from the best and movies, when broke down to single camera shots, aren't very different from comics really. They get to use sound and music, we get to have fun with panelling, but a lot of it is the same shit.

While I'm still at the movies, some tips for storyboarders and directors are applicable to comics too, like the rule of not swapping character positions around within a single scene. When you draw Shinji on the right and Rei on the left, don't switch them around when you change angles, it breaks the flow (yes, that "flow"). You can actually rotate the viewpoint a lot while still maintaining the character's relative position to each other, so take it into consideration.

Backgrounds make a whole lot of difference. You can do it the Kubo way, or you can actually try to manipulate the mood with your backgrounds. Shoujo manga are often examples of doing this in a simple way with particular tones and textures. You know, those roses, lilies, stars and whatever shit goes around there. Actually, shoujo manga often have a considerably different, far less rigid panelling than shounen manga do. Anyway, backgrounds contribute to the mood a lot; dark backgrounds are associated with danger, dread, disgust, generally negative feelings, gray backgrounds are uncertainty and so on.

I could write quite a lot more on the topic, but it's not my blog, so fuck it.

Murata is really really good at pacing. He's very conservative with his paneling, but boy does he know what he's doing.

It's especially interesting if you look at his redrawings. How he re-imagines scences, how he changes his layout. That's very interesting from a paneling point of view.

>then there's a bit longer stop at her contemplating the taste and finall
It's important to mention that this specific panel has no borders. Literally giving the reader's feeling of time no limit and consequently giving the "contemplating of tea"-moment a timeless feeling. Integrating seemingly irrelevant emotions like this fluidly into the timing of the story is what makes good paneling.

Too long, summarize this in 11 words or less please.

Understanding the action flow without looking at text is good paneling

There are file reading programs that let your flip, split, and resize pages to fit the size of whatever you're reading them on.

And I must say there are manga that look better digital compared to their book counterparts, because spreads can get fucked up by the binding of they're not intentionally drawn to be split in the middle. Dorohedoro is really big example of this, I have the physical volume of this and you can't even see half of Kai's face because it's swallowed by the spine of the book. The most important reveal in the series was ruined.

Anything webtoon, nearly all Korean webcomics have an ugly cellphone scrolling format.

If you forget that paneling is even a thing while you're reading then it has good paneling.

Nausicaa has the densest pages and I love it. I guess because it was printed much larger back then compared to standard manga size today.

This is often repeated, but I think it's kind of bullshit, or at best an oversimplification. If you take no notice of the paneling at all, all that really proves is that it's at least passable (assuming you aren't completely blind, I mean). It might be more than passable, or it might not, but that really all depends on the kind of thing being attempted, and also on the reader. There's plenty of completely-unremarkable stuff that still isn't notably bad, and there's plenty of flashy stuff that's very well done.

The different style/structure is mostly rooted in 70s 24-gumi work, and I think particularly Hagio and Takemiya's stuff. I don't have an issue with it most of the time, personally, but I can see how it could be an acquired taste.

I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but I fucking hate Nausicaa's paneling. I can barely feel any real sense of purpose or progression to the images he chooses, it feels like a slideshow with narration over it.

How is something not good when it does what it's supposed to. OP wasn't asking for "great", good is good. You probably just don't like that this opinion is prevalent, whether you realize it or not. A normal compulsion to be contrary in some way.

>How is something not good when it does what it's supposed to.
>what it's supposed to
Only fully true if "making the story comprehensible and not actively awkward/confusing" is everything paneling is supposed to do, which I can't agree with. This is why I said "at best an oversimplification" - it isn't totally wrong, but it's not a very good explanation, only captures a small part of it, and basically boils the whole thing down to extremely low standards in a way I wouldn't see anyone doing if asked "What is good direction," for example.

>You probably just don't like that this opinion is prevalent, whether you realize it or not. A normal compulsion to be contrary in some way.
Where the fuck did this come from? I criticized something someone said, so I must be a contrarian?

Nice.
Sasuga YKK.

Actually, I take it that much of the panel design/pacing is done, or at least influenced, by ONE. Take a look at Mob or even the original OPM and you'll see how ONE, despite his artwork, really excells at panel design.

Tsugumomo has great paneling.

>stop having opinion different from mine!!

Fuck off retard.

I don't know about panelling, but Murata knows how to make his pictures flow.
comicsalliance.com/manga-yusuke-murata-twitter-digital-comics-paper-deadlines/

What are your thoughts on breaking panels and content flowing into gutters (I think they are called that)? Usually I find it unnecessary.

Bleach unironically has good panelling

>I don't have an example of it at hand

I tend to find that a lot of shoujo manga has really bad flow.

Thanks captain obvious

Shoujo art is literally shit, most have horrible ass flow / panelling. Hell, even the art is shit, 9 out of 10 they cant even draw a fucking background and just leave everything blank / white or post some shit tier effect all over the page and call it background

And i am not touching the retarded ass proportion

Also that thing where they take up a vertical third of the page for the author to write a blog post about some meaningless crap.