Dear author:

[barbarienne]

1. Ellipses are not functionally equivalent to periods or commas. Honest. They go in the same sort of places, but they don't have the same effect

Comments

[dulcimeoww]

Ellipses are our besetting literary sin at the studio. I now have about half a page of quick additional guidelines for the use of them in our comics. One of the very first things I set for our style guide was the notion that you could not start a bubble with ellipses unless it is the continuation of dialogue that is meant to be implied and is not shown anywhere in the comic. I think the same should be true of using ellipses at the start of a paragraph, and even then I would say it's only really valid in dialogue.

I have yet to determine a similar length guide for comics, though, aside from the obvious, "If there are more bubbles than art in a panel, there are too many bubbles."

[burger_eater]

Re: 3): In Game of Cages, I put a 500+ word run on sentence at a climactic moment. Not only did the paragraph run a whole page, it ran, I think, two and a half in the finished book.

I don't think one person has even acknowledged that it's there.

[barbarienne]

Which means you did it right. The author of the book I'm typesetting did not.