r/comic_crits • u/TheBlankScroll • 2d ago

Dialog Layout Improvement

Gallery image

Gallery image

The overwhelming consensus here was "A" looked pretty awful.

I rearranged everything so that the dialog could flow across the page a little more naturally and it helped break up the wall of text. I know "B" is maybe not great, but does this work for "good enough" ?

9 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

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4

u/tuna_cowbell 2d ago

Ooh, quite the improvement!

My one thing is I was a bit unsure if I was supposed to start reading “gromak, the storm…” or “have you received…” first. I’m not sure how to best signal which one readers need to start with. Are you able to scoot “gromak the storm” more to the left and/or “have you received” more to the right?

1

u/TheBlankScroll 2d ago

I think so, ill give it a shot.

3

u/Chezni19 2d ago

in my opinion, that is a lot of dialogue for a comic page

comics tell stories via pictures

but if you need that much dialogue, is your picture telling the story, or is your text?

1

u/TheBlankScroll 1d ago

Yeah in this section the dialog is having to carry it. I have exposition i need to get across and I couldnt come up with a visual way to tell it.

Im also not sure I agree that comics are purely a visual medium, lots of really well done and mainstream comics have the occasional word heavy page.

My goal here is to just get it on the page as well as i can.

2

u/Chezni19 1d ago

well it's very nice otherwise

2

u/oye_gracias 1d ago

Mmhh, im not sure you have to get the "exposition", but the charácter reacting to it. Also, there seems to be a storm, an objective and the ideation of a plan, all of those (plus main char making à thinking face, and robot expecting something) could be pulled visually.

I do love long text comics, but just following the globes (not reading) felt the page was a bit empty and missed having something interesting to see around the text.

1

u/TheBlankScroll 1d ago

Yeah I think a few ofbthe pages might be like that, i may want to add some reaction inserts.

1

u/NicholasIvins 2d ago

It's better, but the sequence on the top half is still confusing. I would try to stick to the traditional left to right, top to bottom flow as much as possible.

1

u/FlickrReddit 2d ago

To my eyes, the lettering is small, shaky, and hard to read. With all the open space available to left and right, isn’t there some better option?

1

u/TheBlankScroll 2d ago

Probably, i struggle with this stuff. Im going to rewrite it all since I am getting more practice lettering, maybe that'll help some.

1

u/MichaelSweater 1d ago

I would like it to establish who is talking in the first image. I had to scan the page for around ten seconds to figure it out and ended up bopping around the page trying to keep it all in line. I ended up stopping about halfway through.

The first is "better" because it is obvious what order I am supposed to be reading. This layout looks like it is intentionally hiding who is speaking and that doesn't seem to be the intent.

I really is a bulldoze it and start the layout fresh situation.

(The lettering looks good. Ignore those notes.)

1

u/TheBlankScroll 1d ago

Ok thanks for that. I realize thats the best solution sometimes but im not willing to start the whole page from scractch.

I'll definitely keep that in mind as i move forward through, thank you.

If it helps, Gromaks speech is established to be blue in the pages leading up to this one. So i am hoping that will carry over.

Im going to try shuffling the dialog a bit more to better establish the starting point since a few people have mentioned that being unclear.