McKelvie Panel Research

Jamie McKelvie is a comic artists that uses very creative page layouts that often work just as well as an illustrative piece than a comic page.

A lot of his images can break usual panel rules and ideas because of the content; they are often heavy in fantasy or superhero powers that allow breaking of the fourth wall and other crazy ideas.

He can set a scene very well without dialogue and without even showing full scenes; the use of close ups and poses make many of his pages very effective with less information that most would have.

The fight scene above is made much more interesting and shorter by using a mix of close ups and maps, which also makes the whole sequence more coherent, and would actually work fairly well as a plan for animating. It stands out from usual superhero fights, and probably makes it easier for the artist to see where the fight is going as well.

Other pages involve different shaped panels and the placement helps to separate actions, and make it seem as though many things are going on at once, making the storytelling on the page less linear and more interesting. It would be very ambitious to try to do as many crazy pages as McKelvie does, but these do show that comic rules and conventions can be broken wile still creating interesting pages, and different panel shapes or orders could possibly be incorporated into my own comic.