Storyboard Comics

Marvel calls them Infinite Comics. Mark Waid just calls them Digital Comics. Their founding-father Yves Bigerel (Balak) calls them Turbomedia ¹. But personally speaking, I prefer to call them Storyboard Comics.

What are they? Well, they are comics, obviously. But presented in a more film-like way. They have multiple screens that you step through. It’s important that you are the one controlling the screen advancement. Otherwise it might cross over into that abomination known as “motion comics.” Or what I call “shitty animation.”

Here’s an experiment where I re-cut an existing comic of mine into this format. Check it out:

Ideally a comic should be designed from scratch for this type of storytelling, but this was fun to do. The last three screens start going down an interesting storyboard-like path. Where a shot is static but the character moves within it.

I also wanted to experiment with using Clip Studio Paint’s timeline support to see if it would make this kind of comic easier to produce. Boy does it! It’s a confusing feature, at first, but once you get the hang of it making a comic like this is a lot easier than just trying to juggle layers or separate files.

Here are some other examples of this style of storytelling for you to read:

• Mark Waid’s Luther
• Marvel’s Avengers vs X-Men #1: Infinite
• Limón
• Balak’s Original Example
• MONKEY GIRL and DRAGON DUDE