Best Visual Format for Showing Growth?

[Mongoose]

A question often comes to mind when I’m starting a new comic project: what format should I use?

I don’t mean file format or venue of publication, these things can be decided later in the production pipeline, but one of the first things an artist has to decide when starting a new comic is the page layout itself. Will it be a traditional graphic novel format to be printed on an 8.5 x 11 page? Maybe something that fits nicely on a PC monitor (I’m rather fond of those very tall comic pages I sometimes see on deviantart.com), or even something that conforms more readily to a mobile screen such as an iPad, iPhone or Android products.

Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about the image sequences most often used by CGI artists in the community.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working in the traditional comic book multi-panel format. I like the control it gives me over the flow of the story, how it lets you emphasize and de-emphasize panels by changing their shape and size on the page and how good it is at describing action in a dynamic way. However, the last comic book I made was in an image sequence format, and I think there is something there.

I chose the format because it fit the narrative device I was using in the story. It was a depiction of a youtube video, so it made sense that each page was one full panel as the video played along the timeline. As a storytelling format, it felt a bit awkward to me (maybe because I was inexperienced with it), but being able to flip the page to show the changes in the main character felt natural even though the subject was drawn instead of rendered. I’m still not sure I prefer it to a multi-panel page, but it certainly made me want to explore the format further.

So as I get ready to start on a new comic, I would like to read people’s opinions on this: traditional comic pages, or image sequences? What do you favour and why?