forum.comicostrich.com

[macsnafu]

Have you ever thought of "breaking the panels" and doing an irregularly-shaped strip aka Scott McCloud? Or at least separating and laying the panels out in an irregular way? This IS the web you're on.

I could understand sticking to the regular format if you're being syndicated in newspapers, but that seems to be a difficult and dwindling market to break into.

Of course, this could apply to any of your strips, not just Station V3.

I used to buy the paperback collections of comic strips when I was a kid. Lots of Peanuts books, but also Andy Capp, Dennis the Menace, Tumbleweeds, the Wizard of Id, B.C, etc. It was actually rather interesting how they'd lay the panels out on the page.

Marvel Comics did some paperback reprints of the early Barry Smith Conan comics that I loved, and they really got creative in cutting up the comic book panels to fit them in the paperback, instead of just shrinking the comic pages to fit the paperback page, like they did with some other reprints. I liked those Conan books so much that I was rather disappointed when I finally saw regular comic book reprints of the originals--it just wasn't as exciting.
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"I love mankind. It's PEOPLE I can't stand!" - Linus van Pelt

[Axonite]

Usually I try to keep the strangeness to the actual content!

I have a number of standard template files I use for the panels - usually I use the 4-panel one, but I also have a 3-panel one, a 5-panel one, and several variations with double (or triple) sized panels that I've used for some strips. And then there's this one: http://www.stationv3.com/d/20070505.html But I try to keep the daily and Sunday strips a standard size, which works well when putting together a square book with three daily strips per page.

It is interesting how they'd lay out strips in some of those smaller books, though - I probably have a lot of the same books you do.
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