Up to 8 pictures per page, speech bubbles and captions, PNG from 2K to 16K
A comic tells a story through a sequence of framed pictures read in order, and the frame — the panel — is the form's basic unit. Narrating with a row of images is an ancient idea, from Trajan's Column to the Bayeux Tapestry, but the modern comic page took shape in newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century, when cheap colour printing made a weekly strip an affordable way to keep readers coming back. From there it spread into comic books, graphic novels, Franco-Belgian albums, Japanese manga and the webcomic, each with its own conventions about page shape, reading direction and pacing.
Much of a comic's craft lives in the choices around the pictures rather than inside them. The white space between panels — the gutter — is where the reader's imagination supplies the movement from one moment to the next, so wide gutters slow a page down and thin ones make it race. Panel size carries emphasis: a small panel reads as a quick beat, a page-wide one as a pause worth staring at. Speech balloons, thought clouds, jagged shout balloons and rectangular caption boxes each signal a different kind of voice, and their tails tell the reader who is speaking without a word of explanation.
Making comics is no longer the preserve of studios. Photo comics, memes, storyboards, lesson materials, product explainers and family scrapbooks all borrow the same grammar, and a handful of photographs arranged into panels with a few lines of dialogue is often clearer and funnier than a paragraph of text. If the result is meant to be printed rather than posted, resolution matters: a page destined for paper wants far more pixels than a screen does, which is why print-quality artwork is prepared at sizes that look absurdly large on a monitor.