Panelling for graphic novels

It has been a while since I last posted on this blog, so what have I been focusing on.....the answer is panels.

My recent findings on panels

After getting “Create your own graphic novel” by Mike Chinn and Chris Mcloughlin out of the library I came across an interesting part about panels. A typical page should between 5 and 7 per page, but can range up to 9. When I re-looked at my manga I noticed that I always tend to have very few panels per page. Actually I struggle to manage to have 5 panels sometimes. Hence I am sure this is one of my problems towards getting the story to move along.

In the aim to try and improve my abilities I spent time looking at some yaoi mangas since the only way to learn is to study other's work, that and it was a good excuse to read some yaoi! Haha. Like what Mike Chinn and Chris Mcloughlin said in their book, the theory stood up where on average each page had about 5-7 panels. I also look at the amount of text per page and again on average this was a lot more than what I ever managed to place upon my pages. For example an average page by Yamato Nase's would have on average about 16 pieces of text. It was after looking at some of Yamato Nase's work that I noticed the big difference between how she lays out her work compared to mine. With Yamato Nase's pages they are crammed full of detail, text and panels compared to mine which tend to be quiet sparse. I also noticed the pages I liked most in Noctivagus: Wandering by Night were the ones where I had managed to get quiet a bit of text on the page and also the ones where there was more panelling.

Hence I think the moral of the story is pages need a lot of text and panels. Although dramatic pages where you want to create atmosphere work well with little on them, an average page needs to be full of detail / text. Therefore my aim for future pages is to follow this logic and increase the amount of text / panelling I have per page.