Establishing Shots | Comic Update #4

After what seemingly felt like forever ( I think it was only three days), I finally have my computer back from the repair shop. My trackpad had suffered death by coconut water. But now that all is well, I can finally share the next two pages of my victorian comic with you!

Page 6

In comics, and many other media, establishing shots serve the purpose of conveying the environment the subject matter is in. A big rule in comics, as I was taught by my professors, is you need at least one establishing shot per page. So let's say your character is suddenly in a diner in page one and you have your establishing shot: in page two, even if the characters haven't changed surroundings, you still need one shot reestablishing the environment.

These generally are the first panels of a page but you can have them in the middle or at the end if, for example, you want to set a brief moment of mystery.

I didn't have much to say about the process of these pages; the composition changed a tad from the thumbnails but other than that I didn't come across any roadblocks. So, I thought it might be a good time to bring up establishing shots for this post since these two pages set up a new environment and, in the dialogue, set up a lot of the story.

Page 7

This page has three establishing shots since the characters are taken to three different parts of the house. I tend to do a lot of close up shots & wide shot combos in my comics; I find that having a variety of shots makes for more interesting storytelling. While there is a time and a place for repetition if you don't have a specific reason for doing so, having several of the same shots back to back can get boring.

I feel as though I should have a disclaimer at the end of all of my comic posts that any rules that I talk about are not 100% set in stone and can and have been broken. For example, there is a rule that if you have a dialogue-heavy comic you want to avoid having a page just of talking heads. It is almost always repetitive and boring. However, David Aja, who creates really interesting page compositions for the Hawkeye comic, said "eff it" and gave us a page just of talking heads and it worked. So I think it's important to know the rules and the basics but keep in mind that you can break these rules if you can do it in an interesting way.

That's my spiel

I have one more page to share before I go back to the beginning to ink & color. I'm going to fully complete the first 8 pages of the story before I go ahead and pencil the rest of it...which is probably going to be upwards of 64 pages. So that will be a fun time.

Thanks for sticking around and I hope you continue to follow me through this process!

You can check out my previous comic updates here:

Update 1
Update 2
Update 3

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Website: https://www.theresachiechi.com/