Scripting out a comic is incredibly useful. Especially if one is prone to spelling errors. I usually script out my comics a scene at a time. It doesn't set anything in stone, it's just good for figuring out the flow of everything and working out what text should be on what page and stuff like that.
Do thumbnails to plan out panel layouts on the page. The more you plan layouts, the better your layouts will be.
Borders break up panels, create time and space, don't try making a comic without them.
Without text bubbles, text just looks lazy. Text should be clear, readable, not too small, in some font that's easy to read, in some color that's easy to read, and please not in pencil.
Empty white space in every panel gets boring quite quickly. Backgrounds show WHERE characters are and what the world is like. A photoshop filter with psychodelic colors does not count as a background.
Layouts is variety makes for interest.
· Try different angles. Don't have any two panels on a page be from the same angle.
· Art should reach to the sides of each frame. It really looks bad when it doesn't. Especially when it's a closeup of someone's eyeball.
· Draw not only from different perspectives, but the distance from the camera to the characters is also important to change around.
· And one last thing about layouts - if you don't write in Japanese, don't lay out your comic from right to left.
Now it’s about dark, light and color.
· For black and white comics, my friend told me a rule that 20 percent of the image should either be black or white, and the other 80 percent should be of the other. This gives just enough blackness for the white to really seem white, or just enough whiteness for the black to really seem black. The further away from the 50/50, the less grey a page will appear and the more interested it will look.
· In greyscale comics, or comics done in monotones, this is harder. There is a tendancy to outline everything in black and have that black be the only darkest shades on the page. DOn't!! A page looks so much better with that contrast between the black and white parts.
· In colored comics, it's very tempting to just color things in generic tones. If you can mix all of the colors together and it comes up with the most generic grey, then chances are you're using quite average colors and the page has no specific point of interest.
· The best thing to do, for all type of comics, is to consider the page as a work of art and treat the layout and color scheme of the entire thing as you would a single picture.
