Imagine you’re at the movie theaters, watching a fight scene. The caped hero and villain are dueling it out on the dark street alleyway, fighting for their lives and honor.
BAM! The hero slugs a punch, landing it square in the jaw of the villain. The villain wipes his mouth as the blood starts to drip dramatically down, then gives a little knowing smirk. With a loud thud, an unexpected third party comes swinging in from behind the hero, emerging from the dark corner of the alleyway to tackle him down to the ground, head first.
As you’re reading the scene play out above, what do you imagine in your head?
Maybe you see the two people fighting in 2D, as though in an arcade video game. But more than likely, you’re imagining what you’ve seen in films, with a variety of angles, different shots offering closeups and wide views, and special zoom ins on emphasized points.
Minnie, my cat, is also pondering this important question as she examines the books from a new perspective.
Now imagine translating this exact same scene into a series of panels, as in a graphic novel.
Graphic novels are a series of panels, like stills of the moving images that make up film.
There is so much overlap in the pacing, direction, and storytelling of films and graphic novels! As I’ve been watching and analyzing more and more feature films, TV shows, and shorts, it’s helping me take a more cinematic approach to the way I lay out my newer graphic novels.
Let’s dive into some ways that film and graphic novels overlap, and if you’re working on your debut graphic novel, or maybe you’re a seasoned graphic novelist, perhaps you’ll find some interesting nuggets to help you out as you figure out your pages!
Number of Panels = Pacing
As I worked on my upcoming graphic novel A SKY OF PAPER STARS, I’ve revised the pacing of the story repeatedly, to make sure that the beats of my story were hitting at just the right moments. In film and graphic novels, the way you slice up the scene and add in cuts to show different angles tells you a lot about time.
When you’re watching an action sequence in a film, you’ll sometimes see a series of cuts, indicating that a lot is happening in a short period of time. To produce the same effect in graphic novels, illustrators will place many more panels on a page, cutting up the action to show more information in a short period of time. This gives the reader more information, showing the fast pace.
On the other hand, maybe you only place one panel in the whole page, or even a full spread. This allows one moment to take up a larger amount of time. The reader is focusing on this singular moment, whatever it is that you want to highlight. In film, this is the equivalent of the establishing scene, or maybe it’s a crucial moment that changes the course of the main character’s story. Either way, it’s something you want to really emphasize for the reader and have them take a breath to take it all in.
For example, this panel I’ve included here is from A SKY OF PAPER STARS, and it takes up half the page! Just this single panel. Here I wanted to show the emotion of what Yuna, the protagonist, is feeling after the events preceding this. It was also a nice way for me to establish the scene of her room, showcasing her personality and interests. This panel helps the reader take a breath before the next scene unfolds, also allowing for a better understanding of Yuna and what’s going on.
This is a fairly basic concept in comics and films, so I almost feel silly pointing it out, but it’s definitely an important one to look out for as you are in the sketching and paneling phase!
Types of Panels = Mood
One thing I’m in awe of veteran graphic novelists is the creative ways you can draw in panels to be more immersive. This goes beyond just the impressive art that artists create on the page, although different art styles definitely convey certain moods!
What I mean by “Type of Panels” is similar to the way films might color grade: it’s all to set the tone and establish the mood. I’m not a professional filmmaker or a cinematographer, so I’m not familiar with all of the toolkits that can be used for film, but I am very familiar with graphic novels, and there are many toolkits for graphic novelists to use!
For example, this is a series of panels that are near the beginning of A SKY OF PAPER STARS.
I specifically chose this scene to be in blue, with no panel borders. When you read the book, you may be able to ascertain why that is, but to give you a little glimpse without giving away any spoilers, the tone of these panels is meant to evoke a calming, yet nostalgic feeling. I didn’t want the colors to detract from the mood, and by having it be borderless, it gives a hazy, memory like feeling.
Page 108 - 110 are one of my favorites, because they are in full color, but I chose to set the panels in a nonconventional manner. I can’t reveal this one, because it’s so important to the plot, but I will say that I basically whipped out half the tools in the toolkit for this series of pages!
You can take speech bubbles out of the frame, take the art out of the frame, keep the speech bubbles inside two separate frames, but connected by a thread… the possibilities are endless! Some beautiful examples in other graphic novels I’ve seen have had borderless panels that extend all the way to the ends of the page, but only 3/4ths of the spread, which allows for both breathing room and a very moody way to set the ocean backdrop.
Other useful tools I’ve seen used include changing the color of panel borders, shaping the panels in experimental ways (circles, jagged lines, swirls, etc.), and even using a completely different brush such as switching from hard pen-drawn backgrounds to watercolor washes…
I can’t list them all out, but I’d highly recommend seeing what different artists do in all of their books! This is one of my favorite parts of creating graphic novels. It’s so creative, and I’m always inspired by the graphic novels I pick up.
Where You Place the Camera Matters
Just as a director uses camera angles, lenses, lighting, and more to tell the story creatively, as an artist of graphic novels, you can also set the scene. The immense pros of telling it in graphic novel format is that you can literally move the camera anywhere!
This is such a tiny example, because I can’t reveal too much yet, but this small illustration is a part of a panel in A SKY OF PAPER STARS, showing Yuna peering outside of the window on an airplane.
Okay, okay, this one might not seem as impressive film-wise, but as an illustrator, you can get very funky with the angles!
You can have a very wide shot of the whole scene, then zoom right into the main subjects as the story unfolds. Maybe you have the camera zoom in on a hand, with everything behind it blurred, like an 80 mm lens f/1.8 with some bokeh effects behind it. Your emphasis is on what’s going on with this hand, and then BAM! A new scene, wide angle, with someone walking into the room in an almost top-down view. We then see a new angle, with the character quickly hiding whatever it was behind her. We’ll put the person walking into the room in the foreground, out of focus, and the character hiding her hand in the background, but still zoomed in enough that the distance between them doesn’t seem so far.
All of this is possible with panels. As mentioned earlier in this post, think of each panel as stills from the moving image that is film!
Here’s another small panel from my upcoming graphic novel. I chose this shot because I wanted to show two characters getting into the car, but in a specific and interesting way. Instead of having the camera directly facing them getting in, I used this angle to show the face of the driver as well. Of course, I could have just had the driver in the foreground and the two in the background, but just as in film, you have to make that decision of which one you’d prefer and what helps tell the story.
Layer these kinds of angles and vary them from panel to panel to keep the art engaging and to tell a secondary story through the art, one that doesn’t have to use words to tell what’s going on.
Storytelling is Storytelling.
The last three points have focused mainly on the art, but I also wanted to highlight the similarities for writers as well. I’ve been practicing screenwriting, and just like in any story, the principles of writing still stand. Storytelling is so similar across all the formats, whether that’s film and graphic novels, or musical theater performances! The execution may be different, but the core content structure stays the same.
Graphic novels are written as scripts. Just like in screenwriting, you have scenes, characters, and sometimes even directions if you wish! Because I’m both writing and illustrating my books, I don’t have to communicate with a future artist to collaborate on the book. This means my scripts are typically very bare minimum, with just enough information needed to understand what’s going on with dialogue and the plot.
What I personally find fascinating in films is those scenes where the dialogue feels so real. Good writing, combined with talented actors, directors, and the whole team make for an Oscar-worthy film. Similarly in books, the writing has to hold up for the characters to feel alive, paired with the visuals, pacing, and the whole publishing team bringing the book to the final stage.
I re-read my dialogue out loud as though I’m an actor practicing my script. This helps hone the words to feel like something the character would actually say.
Beyond the spoken words, graphic novels have a chance to play around with narration, labels through the art, and other insightful ways the reader can pick up tidbits.
Another aspect of this writing is obviously the plot itself! A strong story is, as obvious as that sounds, essential for a strong book. Studying the fundamentals of storytelling has helped me improve from my first book to now the seventh book I’m working on.
Final Thoughts: Pick Your Format!
Film and graphic novels may be two different formats and mediums, but they do share the idea that you can tell the story visually. Because graphic novels for younger readers are a few hundred pages at most, if you add in the pauses, the big stunning visuals that span a whole two page spread, etc., you might not be able to tell as detailed of a story as you’d like. This is where you as the creator must decide whether or not graphic novels are the right format for the story.
A SKY OF PAPER STARS was absolutely meant to start as a graphic novel. If it ever got adapted into a film, I’d have to add more to the plot for it to hold up, but for the ~300 pages within the book, it’s more than enough. Whereas in another case, I was working on a book that just simply required too much development in the characters, with multiple subplots. I’ve decided to pursue this story as a prose novel instead of a graphic novel, because eliminating the visual element allows me to more efficiently fit in more information onto the limited pages.
So these are all considerations to have as you think about your graphic novel.
Here are the films and TV shows I watched in the last few weeks. I won’t tell you my opinion of each of them, but I will say that I didn’t like them all ha:
La La Land (2016) - this is a rewatch!
True Detective (2014)
Old Boy (2003)
Prisoners (2013)
Forgotten (2017)
The Whale (2022)
The White Lotus (2021)
I learned a lot, especially from re-watching La La Land. It was so useful for me to see how the director chose to set up the scene, from the establishing scene to the sequence of events. Sometimes, the scene will be one take — you can achieve a similar effect in graphic novels, too. There is one book I always revisit where the two pages are just two characters dancing, and you can visually see the passing of time without the constraints of any panels, simulating filming something in one take. And the use of color in films, how they chose to include montages for certain beats in the story but really expand upon other ones in a longer dialogue between the characters… all of these go hand in hand for graphic novels, too.
The next time you are stuck on your graphic novel, watch some films and study how the story unfolds! It just might inspire you in your writing and drawing.
Alright, that’s all folks! Happy creating :)