Comic Book Glossary: Panel

Welcome to the first installment of Comic Book Glossary! One of the aims of the Comics Cube! has always been to help out the newer readers who may be interested in, but aren't all that knowledgeable in comics. Click here for the index!

We'll start out with the basics. See the boxes that contain the pictures? Those are called panels.

CALVIN AND HOBBES by Bill Watterson

Panels are, as Art Spiegelman calls them, the Ur-language of comics, the basic building blocks of the medium. They control the action. While "panels" are typically thought of as boxes, a panel can actually take on any shape, such as a television screen, seen here from Frank Miller's BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS:

To index cards, seen here in Will Eisner's THE SPIRIT.

Whatever panel you choose, just make sure it suits that particular moment in your story! For example, here's Neal Adams, tilting the panels diagonally so it gives an increased length for the falling Beast:

And changing the panel size alone can change the amount of tension in any given scene, as proven here by Steve Ditko in one of the greatest and most important Spider-Man moments of all time:

You can view some more effects of different panel shapes in some installments of Comics Techniques and Tricks!

Comics Techniques and Tricks: Marcos Martin

Welcome to another edition of Comics Techniques and Tricks, in which we showcase techniques that only comics can do! Click here for the archive!

When you have a continuous background with moving figures in front of it, like this or this, it's called a polyptych. Here's Marcos Martin using a variation of that technique in Amazing Spider-Man #561, framing Spider-Man's motion in one smooth curve, all the while keeping the entire page as one continuous background.

Note how even the first panel is an interior shot of exactly the same spot that that setting would correspond to on the exterior shot of the building!

Cleverness, design, and a clear flow - that's why Marcos Martin is one of my current favorite artists!

Comics Techniques and Tricks: Ben Oda and Marshall Rogers

Welcome to another edition of Comics Techniques and Tricks, in which we showcase techniques that only comics can do! Click here for the archive!

Detective Comics #475 gave us the classic Joker story (and quite frankly, my favorite), "The Laughing Fish." In the story, the Joker decides to poison a bunch of fish so it all has his face on it, so he can claim copyright and trademark to the fish and therefore get royalties from the sales.

Isn't that concept just so awesome? Really? It's SO insane that it's perfect!

Anyway, today's comic trick is given to us by Ben Oda, who lettered the comic. Marshall Rogers gave him the framework for the tricks, and Oda integrated the lettering so well that it felt like it was done by the artist. Note the sequence below.

And note how the "HONK" and the "SKREECH" sounds play into each other, just as they actually would in such a situation. Even the directions of the sound effects are appropriate; the "HONK" signifies the horizontal movement of the truck, while the "SKREECH" signifies its attempt at a sudden stop. It stops at the end of the "HONK," signifying that it's too late.

Lettering is an art too, folks!

Comics Techniques and Tricks: Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder

Welcome to another edition of Comics Techniques and Tricks, in which we showcase techniques that only comics can do! Click here for the archive!

One of comics' most important creators, Harvey Kurtzman continually innovated with a bunch of tricks! In Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD #7 (the antecedent for MAD Magazine), Kurtzman and artist Bill Elder lampooned Sherlock Holmes with "Shemlock Shomes" and his sidekick, Dr. Whatsit. In the following sequence, Shomes and Whatsit try to get from one place to another.

Note the ease and convenience with which we read the panels. If you did this in any other medium, it would call too much attention to the shifting modes of transportation - prose would have to detail the exact shifts, and it would be too disorienting in film. But in comics, our visual cues are just the figures of Shomes and Whatsit. We see them moving and it registers to us that they're moving. The modes of transportation are almost an afterthought!