Saffron and Sage

Gunnerkrigg Court is exceptional at maintaining clarity, even with it’s occasional fancy layouts. If you wanna know layouts, GK might legitimately just be the best source to study. Check this shit out. I’ve added lines indicating where the eyes track on this page.

You start at the top-left because you read English and that’s where pages start in English. There’s an interesting thing in that area, Kat’s face, so you look at that first. Then you notice the word balloons and read them in a logical order until you get to “the beating heart we have lacked”. But then there’s not an obvious next word balloon!! You could go down, or you could go left. What to do?

Well, there’s an interesting thing to the left of the word balloon, so you follow the purple shoulder. You go left. You go straight left until you hit the beating heart in the middle of the page. Note that the beating heart is to the left and above the word balloon that says “beating heart”, but the panel composition has you read the word balloon right before seeing the heart it’s referring to! The circled heart is an illustration for the circled text, and even though they’re not close, you’re lead by Robot’s body to see it all in the right order. If you don’t think that’s the tight shit ever get the fuck outta my face. (There are a lot of little details at play here, more than I could notice. Imagine if Kat’s eyes were open, we might look at her face and then move down to see what she’s looking at)

Once you see the heart, there’s still Robot’s lower body making a straight line pointing from the heart to the next word balloon. The robot in the center is literally bending over backwards to ensure you read the word balloons in the right order.

After “The instruments of touch” you go right because that’s the way you read, and are drawn to the hand by the lighting, which gets your eyes moving in the direction to read the final panel. And you never notice any of it, because Tom Siddell is really fucking good at making comics.