I used to get really fancy with the panel layouts on my comic pages. They would still flow left to right, top to bottom. But I played pretty fast and loose with where exactly they were on the page. Sometimes they would be floating off in space, sometimes they would even be overlapping with another panel. I thought that this would make the page more visually interesting. In reality though, I think it just made them that much harder to read, and definitely harder to reformat later when I wanted to make them more mobile friendly.

These days I stick to a much more streamlined and compact layout, which as a result allows me to fit much more on a page. It also saves a lot of time, because I already know how the panels are going to be laid out. All I need to decide is how many to put on each row, and how wide they should be.

Occasionally though, I can still have a little bit of fun, like on this page here. Having the last few panels gradually get smaller and smaller at the same time they got darker and darker was a fun way to represent Kraal losing consciousness. And because it’s not something that happens every page, I think it has more of an impact in this case.

Remember, sometimes less is more!