Hey all – I wanted to expand a little upon this month’s strip, beyond what was covered in the page itself. The idea is obviously inspired by Wally Wood’s “22 Panels That Always Work” (which, if you haven’t seen, you owe it to yourself to check out – there are many sources online. Some artists make their entire careers out of those 22 panels …).

Now, just as Wood’s 22 panels which always work are not the ONLY 22 panels which always work, these 16 panels of which I am not terribly fond are not the only 16 panels in comics with problems. And likewise, just as the wrong artist can make shambles of any of Wood’s seemingly foolproof panels, ther are undoubtedly artists who can pull off some of the sixteen panels mentioned here (I seem to recall that Los Bros Hernandez have tackled examples nine and ten before, to their usual great effect).

My criteria for picking these particular panels was to look for panel layouts which were exceptionally overused (and if I could pick one off the top of my head, that meant I’d seen it wayyyy too often) and which gave me, as a reader, the least amount of useful information. Thus, these sixteen…

There were two panels I ultimately decided not to include. The first was just Rob Liefeld’s signature and the note “Anything attached to this,” but it’s sort of an old joke that’s been overrun into the ground as of several years ago. Yes, the man clearly has some deficiencies in his artwork, yet his fans gloss over it. If only we all had such fans …

The other one was suggested by folks on my blog; I ended up not including it because I just plain had no idea how to describe such a specific scenario in a short, concise comic panel. Apparently – and now that it’s been mentioned to me, I’m seeing it all over the place – there is a trend in superhero comics to compose a scene with the prominent pulchritude of a lady superhero framing the foreground, while some male hero carries out the actual story-advancing action. So what you get is Iron Man offering exposition over the curvaceous cosine of She-Hulk’s pert posterior, or Wildcat in some punch-drunk panorama within the proscenium arch of Power Girl’s ginormous gazongas.

I also didn’t include that one because it can be a valid visual storytelling device – assuming the naughty bits being brought to the foreground have SOMEthing to do with the story, or how two characters interact, or … well, anything. That they’re not is evidently the problem with this particular panel, and since that’s a lot of ground to cover and explain in a single panel of my own, I decided to stick with the eminently divisible “16” as my final count …

...I'd say that the "James Joyce's Ulysses reprinted in two panels of fight dialogue" is a perfect contender, even by my criteria - it really does give you too little information, considering that the volume of dialogue overwhelms the simplicity of the action.

But hey, even if it didn't fit my criteria, I welcome folks to use their own guidelines in identifying other criminally overused or poorly applied panels common to comics ...

haha, awesome. I'm a frequent offender of several. Nr 1, 2, 9, 10 and especially nr 13 (feet in perspective *brrrrrr!*). The only one I don't agree with is nr 1. I actually prefer talking heads with their mouth closed for most types of art unless there is a particular expression that is needed. For four through eight I think it's ok to not redraw backgrounds for every panel.

Damn, why didn't I notice this earlier?

A lot of good stuff there, not so much on the these-pictures-are-stupid scale but on the this-has-been-done-a-lot field. Gotta agree with GiantPanda, though. I've used #1 a lot myself, for several good reasons.

One, still pistures of people with their mouths open tend to look stupid.

Then, sometimes there are two or more people talking in one panel. If they all have their mouths open, it will look as if they're talking at the same time.

Most importantly, though: The purpose of the panel isn't to show that someone is talking. The speech balloon covers that. The image should deliver emotional information on how the speech is delivered, and sometimes an open mouth just gives the wrong impression. Related to that, the image can focus on an entirely different action (like the Ridiculous Fight Scene mentioned in the comments). The image doesn't follow the text or mark the moment when the text is being said. The image stands for itself, and the text illuminates an aspect of it.