femfreq:

Jonathan Coulton’s song about a princess who doesn’t need saving by anyone is soon to be turned into a children’s book with Greg Pak via a stretch goal on this crowdfunding project.

chirart:

There are some basic key points I try to keep to mind:

• variation of layouts per page. I like to do thumbs of 4-5 pages at a time (or per “scene” I suppose!) because I like to see how the pages flow from one to another, and I try to make sure the same layout isn’t used twice. It may seem like a finicky detail, but it provides for a more engaging and interesting platform to read, I think.
  
  
• It’s possible to have a comic that’s just the same size square repeated/stacked on one another with no variation, but they tend to come up within certain genres or for specific means. Unless you’re drawing a comic/gag strip (like Calvin and Hobbes, or something like a 4-koma), or something that puts the focus on the mundane like an indie slice of life comic (I think of TJ and Amal, which is an excellent story that is largely made up of characters talking in an enclosed space—EK Weaver utilizes it brilliantly), you want to learn a bit about visual direction and panel composition.
  
  
• Try to have a complete mini-story on every page. Have a beginning, middle, and end to any given page as often as possible—even if that ‘end’ is a cliffhanger for the next one.
  
  
• I’m a big believer that the art should be telling the story, not the dialogue.
  
  What I mean by this is: The dialogue shouldn’t have to explain/clarify what is happening on the page for the reader to understand. The art should just be able to show it, so the dialogue doesn’t need to explain anything, and it can focus on more important things.
  
  Like, for example, if Alice and John are having a conversation, and during the conversation John becomes increasingly irritated by Alice, you want the art to show this. You don’t want the dialogue to make a note of something like “Oh, are you annoyed?” or putting a thought bubble like “He’s getting annoyed…”
  
  Don’t get me wrong, sometimes spelling out the obvious is FANTASTIC for comedy, but for drama this is a serious mood killer! Your reader should be able to plainly see the characters SHOWING what’s happening. If this conversation were a silent movie, and the dialogue was removed from the page, would you still be able to understand what’s happening? Would you still be able to tell John is irritated?
  
  If the art fails to communicate anything, than the writing has to take over that burden, and at that point the art kind of becomes a little useless.

These are just some things I figured out for myself. They may or may not work for you. Experiment yourself, and good luck!