stevelieber:

Wally Wood’s 22 panels That Always Work have been passed around like cartoonist samizdat for decades now, and this is a good thing. But keep in mind, they aren’t a lesson in how to make good comics, they’re something to keep handy in case of emergency. The emergency in question is when a writer has handed you a non-visual script. (Read this letter from David Mamet to his writing staff for more about such things.)

Comics are a visual medium, and work best when they use pictures to advance and enrich the narrative. Sometimes a script doesn’t do that, but an artist still needs to communicate the impression that there is something dramatic taking place. Tv and film have sound and movement to help accomplish this goal. In comics, we’ve got variations in gesture, lighting, and composition.

At six or seven panels a page, you can run through a lot of clever shots very quickly trying to keep the reader’s eye engaged. When you’re all out of good ideas, that’s when you need to break the glass and deploy some of Wood’s 22.