Super Secret Tricks of the Trade
Shhh… Let’s Keep This Between Ourselves
Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, It’s Magic
Years ago, when digital comic art was still finding its footing, I was having a conversation with an artist buddy whose digital skills were light-years ahead of everyone else’s at the time. I asked him how he pulled off a particular effect on one of his pages.
He looked at me and said, “A magician never reveals how his tricks are done.”
I laughed at first. Then I realized he wasn’t kidding.
He eventually told me, but only after I swore I’d never share it with anyone else. Underneath that response wasn’t arrogance or secrecy for secrecy’s sake. It was a concern that if he revealed how some of his magic was done, his competition would gain ground and he’d lose his edge, and maybe more importantly, lose work.
What he wasn’t accounting for was this: he already drew better than ninety percent of the artists in the business. In his hands, a Photoshop trick became a creative decision. In someone else’s hands, it was just a blunt tool.
That conversation stuck with me, because it wasn’t the first time I heard that from an artist, and it cuts straight to why I’ve always believed in demystifying the process.
I Am OZ, The Great And Powerful
When I was Editor-in-Chief at Marvel, one of the things I loved most was giving fans a no-holds-barred look behind the curtain. Through my weekly columns, Joe Fridays, and later Cup of Joe, I talked openly about how the sausage was made. The good decisions. The bad ones. The days things worked, and the days they absolutely didn’t.
And here’s the thing that surprised a lot of people.
Revealing the mechanics didn’t kill the magic.
It enhanced it.
Readers became more engaged because understanding how much thought, planning, and care went into each book didn’t make the stories feel smaller or less real. It gave them weight. And when we dropped the ball, that transparency created an understanding that the people working at this big, bad wolf corporate machine called Marvel weren’t out to destroy their childhoods. We loved the characters as much as they did.
I didn’t reinvent the wheel here. It’s what Stan Lee was so great at: demystifying by humanizing.
That experience is a big part of why I’m doing this series.
The Vanishing Apprentice
For decades, there were legitimate paths for young artists to learn storytelling by proximity. Apprenticeships, whether formal or informal, were baked into the industry.
You had studios like Will Eisner’s, which functioned as a training ground as much as a production house. That model carried forward through places like Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios, The Studio, Crusty Bunkers, Upstart Associates, Gaijin Studios, and later, the Image founders’ individual shops.
Young artists didn’t just study finished pages. They watched pages get corrected. They saw mistakes fixed in real time. They learned pacing, clarity, staging, and decision-making by being in the room.
That pipeline doesn’t really exist anymore. At least not in North American comics.
Today, most artists learn in isolation. They learn from social media. From how-to clips. From trying to analyze finished work without context. They rarely see the invisible decisions that make storytelling work, or the garbage can filled with discarded attempts, corrections that prevent it from falling apart.
So this is not a gospel, nor rules carved in stone. It’s just my attempt to talk about some of the stuff that I’ve learned over the years… of course, your mileage may vary.
The Invisible Language of Visual Storytelling
Story One: The Deal You Make With the Reader
Before we talk about panels, camera angles, page turns, or any of the fun stuff, we need to talk about something more basic.
Something invisible.
Every story makes a deal with its audience. It’s never written down. Nobody announces it. But the reader feels it almost immediately. The deal goes something like this:
I’ll give you my attention.
You guide me.
Don’t let me get lost.
That’s it. That’s the entire contract.
You’ll notice what’s not in that deal.
The reader doesn’t say, “Entertain me.”
They don’t say, “Wow me.”
They don’t even say, “Surprise me.”
Not yet.
Entertainment comes later. It’s a result, not a prerequisite. It’s what happens when the reader feels safe enough to relax into the experience. When they trust that the storyteller knows where they’re going, and more importantly, knows how to get them there.
Without that trust, spectacle doesn’t entertain. It distracts. And distraction is fragile. The moment entertainment starts to feel like work or homework, that spell breaks, especially if they’re not confident the storyteller knows where they’re going.
When a reader gets confused, their first thought is usually, Maybe I missed something. When they realize they didn’t, the next thought is:
This isn’t working.
They don’t blame themselves. They blame the storyteller.
This is true whether you’re reading a comic, watching a movie, scrolling your phone, or sitting through a pitch meeting. Confusion feels like incompetence, even when it isn’t intentional.
Clarity builds trust.
Accidental confusion breaks it.
And once trust is broken, the reader pulls back. They might keep reading, but they’re no longer with you. They’re judging you.
Everything we’re going to talk about in this series exists to protect that trust.
You Knew This Before You Knew This
You were fluent in visual language before you could read a sentence. As a kid, you knew instinctively who was angry, who was in charge, who felt safe, who felt dangerous, and when something was wrong, even if no one said it out loud.
Take a second and look at a photo or any image around you, and notice what your eyes focus on first. Think about why your attention is drawn there. This simple exercise tells you all you need to know about how you instinctively decode visual cues. Nobody taught you that formally. You absorbed it. Your brain learned to read faces, posture, movement, and space because it had to. Survival relied on it.
That instinct never goes away.
Which means when you look at an image, your brain is already making decisions before you consciously engage with the story.
That’s the invisible language.
What Came First, The Image Or The Story?
This is where a lot of creators get tripped up. They think storytelling begins with plot, dialogue, or a cool moment.
It doesn’t.
Storytelling begins the instant the reader sees the image.
Before a word balloon appears, the reader already knows things. Who matters. Where to look. Whether the moment feels calm, tense, or dangerous. Whether they feel oriented or lost.
If those signals are clear, the reader relaxes and leans in.
If they aren’t, the reader has to work harder than they should.
Readers want to be carried somewhere. They want escape. The moment entertainment starts to feel like work or homework, that spell breaks, especially if they’re not confident the storyteller knows where they’re going.
You Can Break Any Rule You Want
You Just Have to Earn It First
Nothing in this series is about enforcing rules for the sake of rules. Rules exist to protect clarity. They’re the underlying structure that allows communication to happen before expression takes over.
You can break them. You absolutely should break them.
But only after you understand what they’re doing, and why they exist in the first place.
You can’t abstract something you don’t understand.
That’s not opinion. That’s craft.
Pablo Picasso is often held up as the patron saint of abstraction, but what’s usually left out of that story is that he had already mastered classical realism as a teenager. By his mid-teens, he could render the human figure with anatomical accuracy, control light and form, and construct believable space with professional-level confidence.
And once you reach that level that early, a different question starts to emerge.
If you can already render reality perfectly, what’s left to explore?
For Picasso, the answer wasn’t refinement. It was dismantling. He didn’t move toward abstraction because he lacked skill. He moved toward it because realism no longer challenged him. His artistic curiosity pushed him to take reality apart, to examine it from multiple angles at once, to express truth rather than appearance.
That shift only works because the foundation is solid.
The same principle applies to storytelling.
All the tools we have as comic artists, splash pages, broken panels, unconventional layouts, and non-linear sequencing, are powerful. They’re exciting. They’re seductive. And they’re easy to misuse.
Using them without understanding why they work weakens the story.
Using them because they look clever turns technique into noise.
But when you know exactly why a panel should break, why a page turn should land where it does, why a moment needs to fracture or breathe, and you apply that choice deliberately and sparingly, the impact increases. The storytelling gains weight. The emotion lands harder.
Rule-breaking doesn’t create meaning.
Understanding does.
That’s what earns the break.
And that’s the difference between experimentation that feels intentional and experimentation that just feels like attractive fondant on a cake (I hate the taste of fondant).
Contrarian Much?
If you’ve been reading my current project, Marvel Knights: The World To Come (you are reading it, right?), all this talk about clarity might sound counterintuitive. The World To Come is not an easy read. The story is told in a nonlinear, deconstructive format spanning decades. It asks the reader to hold pieces in their head and trust that they’ll eventually connect. This intentional ambiguity is designed to encourage reader engagement and, if we’re doing our job right, to transform confusion into a kind of tension.
After the first issue came out, I heard the word “confusing” a lot. That wasn’t unexpected.
What I didn’t sense was frustration rooted in doubt. Readers weren’t saying, “These guys don’t know what they’re doing.” They were saying, “I don’t see it yet, but I trust there’s a reason.”
That difference is everything.
What’s been fun to see, and a relief, is that with each subsequent issue, readers are beginning to see its shape within the abstraction.
For example, if you’re not only reading the main story, but also the journal entries from Dr. McGregor at the end of each issue, issue five rewards that attention, and issue six even more so.
When Christopher Priest and I started building this project, we knew some readers would decide the effort wasn’t worth it. That was a risk we accepted. But trust me, every little detail, even the ones you haven’t noticed yet, is there for a reason.
Patience Grasshopper
I know some of you are already itching for the tangible stuff. The rules. The diagrams. The practical breakdowns.
We’re absolutely going there.
But before we do, we need to dig deeper. Not into the rules themselves, but into why they exist at all, or better yet, what created them.
These rules weren’t invented in a vacuum. They developed over time, shaped by how human beings see, feel, and process information. Once you understand that, the rules stop feeling arbitrary. They become tools you can trust, bend, or break with intention.
Why This Matters Going Forward
Everything we’re going to talk about builds on this foundation.
Direction.
Movement.
Camera angle.
Lighting.
Panel size.
Page rhythm.
Silence.
Crescendos.
Even spectacle.
All of it exists to quietly guide the reader without the reader noticing.
That’s the job.
If you remember nothing else from this entry, remember this:
The goal isn’t to impress the reader.
The goal is to make them feel like they’re in good hands.
When Next We Meet
We’ll look at where this visual language actually comes from, and why your brain responds to certain images before you’re even aware of it.
Thanks for reading.
You’re AMAZING!
JQ
Charlotte, this is why I love Arrested Development. It's the only comedy I've ever seen that would create a setup for a joke that wouldn't pay off until episodes later. This kind of thing is always risky, and even riskier in comedy. A call back within an episode is one thing, but weeks later...
“Don’t get me lost.” Man, I love that. As a creator, that’s my #1 rule: don’t confuse the reader, and that’s on the whole team. Writer, artist, colorist, letterer.