The instinct, when you first try to turn a day into a comic, is to cover the day. Woke up, went to work, meeting, lunch, meeting, home, telly, bed. Seven panels of a person walking between rooms.
It’s completely dead on the page, and it’s worth understanding why, because the same thing makes a written entry that lists your day so dull to reread.
A comic isn’t a summary. It’s a selection.
Pick one moment, not one day
Your unit isn’t “Tuesday.” It’s the fifteen seconds on Tuesday where something turned.
Your manager said “interesting” in a tone you’re still thinking about. The dog found the one puddle. You realised halfway through the meeting that nobody was going to say the obvious thing, and then you didn’t say it either. Your kid asked a question you had no answer to.
There’s your strip. Everything else that happened on Tuesday is context you can drop, and dropping it is what makes the thing readable.
This feels wrong at first, like you’re failing to record your life. You aren’t. In two years you won’t want a manifest of every Tuesday. You’ll want the fifteen seconds.
The four-panel shape
Four panels is the classic newspaper strip length, and it survived a hundred years because it maps onto a structure that works almost automatically.
Panel one: setup. The room, the people, the ordinary state of things. One line at most. Resist the urge to explain.
Panel two: the beat. Add one thing and settle nothing. A complication, somebody arriving, a piece of information landing. Skip this panel and the strip arrives at its ending with no run-up, which is the commonest reason a diary strip feels rushed.
Panel three: the turn. The meaning of the scene changes. Whatever you were building towards happens here, and everything else in the strip exists to make it land.
Panel four: the payoff. The reaction, the deflation, the small honest ending. Often a face and no words at all. It doesn’t have to be funny. It has to be true.
Your days won’t naturally arrive in this shape, so you’ll have to bend them slightly. That’s allowed. You aren’t under oath. Compressing two conversations into one, or moving something an hour earlier so it sits next to the thing it rhymes with, is what every memoirist does, and it makes the record truer rather than less true, because it puts the emphasis where your memory already put it.
Leave the words out
The most common mistake is dialogue that carries everything. Four panels, each with three lines of speech, and by panel two you’re reading a transcript with drawings attached.
Comics work by what happens between the panels. The reader fills the gap. If panel two is your kid asking the question and panel three is your face, you don’t need a caption explaining that you didn’t know the answer. The gap does it, and it does it better than the caption would, because the reader gets there on their own.
A rough rule: if a panel has more than about ten words, check whether the picture is doing anything at all. The fix is usually to cut words rather than add drawing.
Captions are different from dialogue and much more forgiving. A narrator caption in the corner (“Later, obviously”) can do a lot of lifting cheaply.
The ordinary day is the good material
Ask anyone with a long-running diary comic what people respond to and it’s never the holiday. It’s the small domestic thing. The argument about the dishwasher. The specific way a toddler negotiates.
Two reasons for that. Big events are already memorable, so recording them adds little. And they’re generic in a way small ones aren’t: everybody’s wedding is roughly a wedding, but the thing your partner says every single time they lose their keys belongs to nobody else.
If you’re stuck for material, it’s almost always because you’re hunting for something significant. Hunt for something specific instead.
Consistency beats quality
If the person in panel one looks like somebody else every week, you’ve made a series of unrelated drawings. If they look the same, you’ve made a cast, and a cast is what turns a pile of strips into a record of a year.
That matters more than the drawing being any good. A rough character who stays recognisably the same rough character reads as a strip. A beautifully drawn character who changes shape reads as sketches.
How you get there depends on who’s holding the pen. By hand it comes down to reducing yourself to a few marks you can repeat without thinking, which is a craft problem with a well-worn answer. Out of a tool it’s the single hardest thing to get, and most of them don’t manage it. Both are whole topics of their own and we’ll come back to each.
Start smaller than you think
Do one panel. Not four, one.
One panel a day for a fortnight will teach you more about what’s worth keeping than a month of planning four-panel strips you never finish. And a wall of single panels from a year of your life is already the thing you were after when you bought the notebook.
Stripkin does this part for you. You talk for thirty seconds about your day and it comes back as a strip starring a cast that stays the same. The selection instinct above is worth having either way, though, because it’s the difference between a record of your life and a list of your appointments.