Jumping from panel to panel

When I draw the pages, I jump around from panel to panel, not finishing them in sequence. The writer Robert Fiore once asked me if the reason I jumped around was kind of like the process of writing a song, where maybe you’re missing one beat; I thought that was a good way of putting it. When I know there’s something I want to add to a sequence but I’m not sure what it is, I try to leave enough room—I’ll know by the time I get to the end of the story. Occasionally I mess up and I’ll be one panel short. I have no room and I’m driving myself crazy trying to figure out what to take out or how I can combine three panels into one. Sometimes it works, and sometimes I just have to let it go.

—Jaime Hernandez, quoted in In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists by Todd Hignite