How Comics Show Motion in a Still Panel: 6 Techniques

A comic panel is a still picture. Nothing in it moves, yet readers see cars race, fists fly and people fall. That is not magic: cartoonists use a small set of tricks, and most of them were borrowed from painting and early photography more than a century ago.

This guide goes through six of them, where each came from and how to try it in your own pages. You do not need to draw well to use any of them, only to know what the reader's eye is looking for.

A panel is not a single moment

The first thing to unlearn is the idea that a panel is a frozen instant, like a photograph. Scott McCloud argues in Understanding Comics that even one panel shows actions, not a single moment. A speech balloon alone takes time to say, so a panel with three lines of dialogue lasts at least as long as the talking.

Things in the same panel do not even have to happen at the same time. That freedom is what makes the techniques below work: the reader is already used to reading time into a still picture, so a few lines are enough to suggest which way things are going and how fast.

1. Motion lines

Motion lines, also called action lines, speed lines or zip ribbons, are the strokes drawn behind a moving object, parallel to the direction it is going. They tell the reader both where something came from and how fast it is travelling.

Artists drew lines for wind and for the paths of missiles as early as the 16th century, but lines showing movement through the air are newer. Wilhelm Busch and Adolphe Willette drew them in the 1870s, and the French artist Ernest Montaut, whose posters showed car, speedboat and aircraft races, is usually credited with inventing speed lines. Later, Carmine Infantino made them a signature of the Flash comics of the Silver Age.

2. Speed lines in the background

Instead of drawing lines behind the moving thing, you can fill the whole background with neatly ruled lines and leave the figure sharp. This is a staple of Japanese manga and anime, where background speed lines show the direction of an action sequence.

The effect copies a photographer panning a camera to follow a moving subject: the subject stays clear and the world behind it streaks. McCloud notes that a figure standing still against a blurred background can read as moving too. Manga artists also use the same lines with no movement at all, to show a character's determination or fighting mood.

3. Several images at once

In the 1880s the scientist Étienne-Jules Marey photographed people and animals in motion, catching several phases of a movement on one plate. Painters noticed. Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, both from 1912, show motion by blurring and repeating limbs, so that a dog has a dozen legs and a figure becomes a cascade of shapes.

Comics took the idea further. In the 1955 EC Comics story Master Race, the artist Bernie Krigstein drew a character's fall in a way Art Spiegelman traced back to Duchamp's painting and called a watershed moment for comic book art. Drawing a hand three times in one panel, fading the earlier two, still does the same job today.

4. Lean, stretch and dust

Look at the Montaut print at the top of this page. The car leans forward, its wheels are stretched into ovals and a cloud of dust trails behind it. No real car looks like that standing still, and that is the point: the distortion is the speed.

You can apply this to anything. Tilt a running figure forward past the point of balance, stretch a ball into an egg shape along its path, add dust, splashes or flying debris behind it. Readers know a body that leans that far must be moving, because otherwise it would fall.

5. Sound effects

Comics also show movement with words. Sound effects are written as onomatopoeia, words that imitate the noise, and they are usually drawn as part of the picture rather than placed in a balloon. A WHOOSH stretched along the path of a swing shows both the sound and the direction.

Lettering size and shape carry the force. Small, thin letters suggest something light or distant, while big, jagged letters that break out of the frame suggest impact. McCloud also points out that lines can stand for things a picture cannot show, such as wavy lines for heat or a smell.

6. The shape of the panel

Finally, the panel itself can move. The size, shape and arrangement of panels affect timing and pacing: a long, thin panel stretches a moment, a narrow one cuts it short, and a slanted border adds tension. Drawing a figure that bursts through the panel border makes an action feel too big to contain.

This connects motion inside a panel to the motion between panels. If you want the reader to feel a sequence speed up, use smaller and smaller panels. Our guide to sequencing a four-panel strip shows how gutters and panel sizes control pace.

Try it yourself

Pick one action, such as a ball being kicked, and draw it four times: once with plain motion lines, once with a streaked background, once with three overlapping balls, and once stretched with a puff of grass behind it. Show the four to a friend and ask which one looks fastest.

You will usually find that two techniques together beat any one used alone. If you are just starting, our free tools for your first comic page will get you drawing, and how to read a comic explains the rest of the page around your panel.