Comic

The frame stops being one image and becomes a page. Borders divide it, ink outlines hold every form, and the shading is printed rather than photographed.

A page reads in a different order from a shot. The eye jumps between panels instead of scanning one picture, which is why the look changes the pacing of whatever you put in it.

Heavy ink outlines sit on every form, thicker on the silhouette than on interior detail. Colour goes in as flat fills inside those lines rather than as a gradient.

Halftone is how printing makes grey out of one ink. A grid of dots that grow and shrink, coarse enough to see. Newspaper comics used it at a size where the dots are part of the look.

Panel borders are what make it a comic rather than an illustration. Gutters between them, a mix of panel sizes, and the occasional form breaking out across a border.

Use it for action, for a montage that has to cover ground quickly, and for anything you want to read as heightened rather than real.

Skip it for quiet dialogue. Panels chop a scene into beats, and a conversation that needs to flow will come apart.

Animation is drawn and moving with no print artefacts. Flat shaded colour, outlines on the forms, one continuous image filling the frame.

The check is the page furniture. Panel borders, gutters and halftone dots mean Comic. A single drawn frame with none of those means Animation.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) puts comic printing on screen directly. Halftone dots sit in the shadows, the colour separations slip out of register, and panels and captions arrive inside the frame.

Without panel borders the result is an illustration, which is the trap the entry warns about. Ask for panel borders across the frame by name, and say how many panels you want.

The other failure is photographic shading surviving under the ink. Ban soft gradient and ask for halftone dot shading and flat colour fills.