Steve Dillon: "One important thing I realized over time was that you could use a more minimalist style on stuff that was contemporary-based, because people naturally fill in the blanks."

Dave Gibbons: "[...] I've found that as people's tastes become more developed, details become less attractive, and it's composition that becomes most important, particularly in a medium like comics, where shorthand and awareness of space become increasingly paramount."

Brian Bolland, "The" Judge Dredd artist. Now working mainly as a cover artist. Traditionally a penciller and inker but now working almost exclusively electronically.

Frank Miller describes how Gil Kane developed the compositional device of drawing 45 degrees angles from each corner. Where these lines cross are points of focus which can be used to form a "powerful and unsettling dynamic", similar in many ways to Dave Gibbon's rule of three. Miller's style is informed by:

• Full page or tableaux panel serves to slow the reader and make them take in the detail.
• No crossing speach balloons. The same character never speaks twice in the same panel. Miller believes this can confuse the reader.
• Every panel should advance the story (from Will Eisner).
• Uses what Scott McCloud calls aspect to aspect transitions to give a sense of place and space.
• People react differently to black and white comics. Miller claims that in this media, if the panels are too small then people's involvement will detach.

• Miller begins his compositions by adding the full-black areas (of which there are usually a lot in his work), this allows the amount of detail to be reduced.
• Drop in aspect panels at the last to clarify muddied story elements.
• Uses functional "clear line" pencils also used by Herge and Moebius.
• Miller traces roughs onto art-board with no indication of blacks or light sources.
• No establishing shots first. Unlike Jim Lee and Bryan Hitch wants his openings to be as intriquing as possible.
• Although Miller acceeds that an establishing shot needs to be in place in the first few places.
• In shots where two profiles face each other, there is generated a tension in the center of the panel.
• Miller does not use electronic tools. He feels it lacks a "gut level feeling of seeing something drawn by hand".
• Miller uses a lot of full page shots as he believes this "allows a story to breathe in a way in which American comics often don't. They are "like chewing through a brick wall".

Joe Quesada, like Frank Miller liken comic book narrative to music in it's visual rhythm. Quesada draws his fight scene action as flowing from left to right, mirroring the natural reading action. This he believes helps the narrative flow and speeds the narrative. Likewise, to slow a story, he draws the scene focal points moving from right to left.

Quesada draws each panel on a seperate piece of paper before arranging them. Next he lays out a page at 100% final size (65% artboard size). This then gets xeroxed up to full size and lightboxed to the artboard.

In a similar fashion to Steve Dillon, Quesada begins on page 1 and works through a script.

Alex Ross uses Neil Adams' technique of low shots to emphsize drama.

Every so often he tilts a panel on it's side to highten it's drama.

Ross uses one "hotspot" panel per page to grab the readers attention.

Ross pencils, then reworks in watercolour before adding "opaque painting" whites if needed.

Ross draws from photo sessions. He is aware of the danger of injecting too much realism that this method holds. Too much realism, too much detail can dominate the reader's attention rather than the element of mood or plot that the artist intends.

Steve Dillon works full size from the start. He works from the top left to bottom right, a very unusual approach. Dillon employs a lot of cinematic references, he likens his style to drawing panels in sequence from a movie running in his head. Steve Dillon talks at length about layout and frame composition, he says:

• Don't anchor the panel in the middle of the page with strong vertical elements such as trees or buildings. This tends to lead the reader's eye off the page. Instead use these elements at the edges of the page to keep the eye moving accross the panels.
• 
  The 180 degrees rule: In long conversation sequences featuring charcters in the same physical space such as a room, to avoid confusing the reader an imaginary line should be drawn from one character to the other. Any frame in this scene should be drawn as if from one side of this line, never the other. This keeps the character in the same spatial relationship to each other and is a technique derrived from film makers.
• You can use a more minimalist style of contemporary stuff as people naturally fill in the blanks.
• Dillon sequences a page in this way: Establishing shot -> Moving in / relationship shot -> Close ups.

Gibbons describes the origins of the 9 panel per page grid layour used in Watchmen. About this he says that it came from an idea of trying to add weight to the story by providing a fixed point of focus in which characters and events unfolded. Originally this kind of device was used in the 50's by artists like Steve Ditko on the earlier Marvel titles like Spiderman.

Gibbons likes the 'air of authority' afforded to him by this 9 panel grid. Although he never directly says so, it seems that this is because regular panels place the emphasis on the content of those panels rather than having the panels add weight to or in other ways mediate the content and the narrative. They get out of the way of the story.