The MangaForge cast
Each friend shows you one idea by how they act. Meet them all and see how the ideas fit together.
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Panel The panel — the rectangular frame that contains a single moment of story (the atomic unit of sequential art) -
Bubble The speech bubble — the shape-encoded container for dialogue + thought + sound (its outline encodes voice register: thought-cloud / shout-burst / whisper-dotted-line / radio-jag... -
Sweep Speed lines / motion lines — the directional line-bursts that convey speed, impact, and energy direction -
Tone Screentones — the halftone dot/line patterns laid over an area to convey shadow, mood, and emotional register (the manga-specific shading vocabulary) -
Splash The splash page — the full-page or near-full-page impact image that marks a story climax (the moment the page breaks its grid to give one image all the space) -
Lapse The gutter — the empty space between two panels where your own mind fills in what happened; closure, the invisible half of comics -
Segue The transition — how one panel flows into the next, guiding your eye and your sense of time from moment to moment -
Vista The establishing shot — the wide opening panel that shows you where you are before the story zooms in close -
Jolt The reaction beat — the panel that catches a character reacting, so a surprise or a feeling truly lands -
Boom The sound-effect lettering — onomatopoeia drawn right into the art, so you can see a sound as much as hear it -
The Layout The whole page coming together — how the establishing shot, panels, transitions, gutters, and sound-effect lettering arrange to guide one reader eye through one moment of story