The Official Comic Page Template

Hey guys, Erika here!

A friend (Hi Karine!) and I are gunna do a collab comic for funsies and I sent her over the standard Oh Joy Sex Toy comic page template in a shared folder for us to both work in. The above comic is what I whipped up to explain the basics of why it's laid out the way that it is, and then I was like "Hey, waittaminute, I bet Our Venerable and Esteemed Patrons might be interested in this!" soooooo, here ya go!

What you see on the site is one long scroll of a comic, but in reality it is actually multiple book-size pages stuck together! And normally each one of those pages is the exact same size so it can be printed into a book. (Unfortunately the example I chose to illustrate this post does not actually have the exact same-size pages so, uh, sorry if that makes this a little confusing.)

To keep the pages standardized, we give each cartoonist our template, which breaks the page into halves and thirds both vertically and horizontally. When a cartoonist is laying out their design, these proportions help keep them distributing the text and imagery across the page balanced with each other, so you don't accidentally wind up with, like, 100 teeny tiny panels that are too small to read.

Above you can see how the template roughly guides the layout. The first page perfectly fits into the template, while the second and third pages took some liberties, so Matt and I'll have to do some surgery on them if we ever wind up printing this one in a book. BUT. Even with the template stretching, you can see that I was keeping each section of the page blocked into set 'chunks' of space that are basically consistent in size and visually balanced across the page. Even without drawing literal borders around each panel, I very much envisioned these pages as if I were adding panel borders, because it keeps everything organized and gives the eye a natural path to follow.

As a special treat, I've uploaded the OJST template as a .PSD and a .TIF as an attachment to this post, if you wanna play around with it! Link should display at the bottom of this page.

Enjoy!

--Erika