comic craft watchlist

I re-read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics recently. Still good stuff on some elements of comics (mostly; one late chapter, with various hypothetical comic artists, doesn't do much for me.) Inspired by it, I thought I'd make a list of some things to look for when reading comics or manga with more attention.

• Point of View: does the comic (and its "camera") closely follow one person, a few people or hop around a lot?

• Thoughts: does the comic try to depict interior thoughts at all, and for whom? Girl Genius, as far as I can recall, almost never used thought bubbles, apart from one or two comedic moments; it's pretty much 3rd person objective. El Goonish Shive (EGS), uses thought bubbles frequently, for any character it feels like. The manga Blue Star On That Day shows Umi's thoughts pretty liberally, but only Umi's: 3rd person limited.

• Transitions: out of McCloud's categories of X-to-X panel transitions (moment, action, subject, scene, aspect), which apply? Or is it hard to tell? (A lot of what I read has little action, in the superhero sense, and lots of talking, but I guess continuing a conversation without camera-shift is action-to-action.)

• (edited to add) Words and Pictures: are images simply illustrating the words, are words simply providing sound effects for pictures, do they parallel each other? Or do they complement each other, providing more than either alone?

• Panels: are panels just a bunch of rectangles, like this EGS page? Or rather funky, like this Dresden Codak page? Many manga use a lot of diagonal lines, and sometimes characters occluding multiple panels, like this sample. Note how the girl is standing in front of the 2nd and 3rd panels, and in the lower left a hand and cell phone are floating above the plane.

• Words: are there different styles of word balloons and fonts? And do words stay in the balloons? They seem to mostly do so for Western comics and webcomics, but manga likes to add in free-floating words as asides or minor statements, like here

• Thoughts: how are they shown? This page shows multiple styles all on one page: thought bubbles, free floating words, a different bubble ("Speak of the devil"). It also happens to show a couple examples of 'Expressionist' mood backgrounds, like the vertical lines in the top right, or the "fingerprints" of the middle panel. From Blue Star, there's also thought as banner, co-existing with a thought bubble.

• Time: are there any tricks with time? McCloud shows how a stretched moment can be done with multiple panels, or one extra-wide panel. There's also having a 'beat' panel where a character just looks croggled, or says or thinks "....."