Okay so it turns out my biggest pet peeve with amateur comics is people not knowing what proper reading order for word balloons is. You can’t just put them wherever is most convenient for the rest of the picture, unfortunately.
Naturally, this applies to English, manga has its reading priority facing the top-right of the panel instead, and tends to finish columns before continuing rows, on account of the native top-bottom right-left writing direction.
Amateur comics? Heck, I get annoyed seeing this in (allegedly) professional comic books.
Especially with some wall-of-text writers like Bendis.
"Why doesn't this dialogue make sense? Oh it's a 2page spread and I was supposed to continue to the panel to the right instead of the one below."
Thank you for this guide. I should ask my comic shop to post a copy next to the "local artist" section. :-)
Link
Perfesser_Bear
'S'funny. I just went back and looked at the very first Housepets! strip from over ten years ago, and you were following these rules religiously, even then.