Leading the Eye: A Dilemma in Regards to Free Form Comics

                Comics artists working with free form panel layouts where there’s variance in vertical panel length have to be more inventive with the way they lead the eye. They don’t have the luxuries that comics artists working with grid layouts or comics artist working with free form layouts where the panels don’t vary in vertical length.

              Grid Layout                   | Free form w. Vertical Restriction      | Free form w/ Vertical Variance 

                The first two types of layouts can take advantage of the fact that their layouts conform to the habitual reading priority of the eye (left-to-right, top-down), but the free form comic to the right doesn’t conform to that habit so easily. One major roadblock is that the artist complicates the familiar reading priority, and so the act of finding the proper sequence can end up taking away from the reading experience. By using techniques to help lead the eye through the space of the page, the artist can make that journey seamless. Such techniques can be the use of leading lines, spotting blacks, having characters look in a particular direction, placement of word balloons, the composition within the panel, etc.

                One of the biggest challenges I’ve found is, once the eye hits the right of the page, does the artist suddenly break the trait for the eye to find its way back to the left of the page, or does it break the reading priority (as in, go right-to-left)? Sometimes the latter is the case. Let’s look at Oliver issue #1 and see how the artist, Darick Robertson.

How does Robertson lead the eye from one part of the page to another? Well, it’s a combination of leading lines, objects of interest, and breaking the panel border. As the reader is going through the first four panels, the creator uses the scenario of Oliver’s impromptu pole vault in order to invent a way to seamlessly leas the eye back to the left of the page. 

The broom handle acts as a leading line in order to lead the eye to the bird breaking the panel. This bird is important because without it the eye would be more likely to jump to the right of the page and go against the direction of the proceeding panel’s composition which urges the eye back to the right anyway. In fact, the panel featuring Oliver’s flying over the gap may inadvertently lead the eye to the end of the bottom tier sequence. It just muddies flow. This bird on the other hand snatches the eye out of its habit, acting as an exit point from the panel with Oliver about to vault and an entry point into the panel where Oliver is flying through the air.

               

Two pages later we see a similar method of getting the eyes to smoothly travel across the page back to the top-right corner of the tier below. The top left panel features Oliver and Prospero framed to the left, lines leading downward, their forms almost perfectly aligned with Oliver's arm in the panel below. The pivot of the arm allows the eye to follow to the central image, and the tail of the speech balloons leads to the balloons themselves. The speech balloons are composed in a top-down arrangement where the tail of the last balloon directs the eye further downward to the top of the bottom tier.

                The inventiveness required for the seamless direction of the eye in free form comics draws attention to a mundane yet frequent obstacle that the artist always encounters, and the decision of whether or not it's worth guiding the eye back across the page or letting the audience's reading habits take them back across the page is something that deserves deeper appreciation.