Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
I'm not saying that Jeph can't do good layouts. On more than one occasion he's done something really cool looking - the introduction of Boaty in the middle of a wide blue ocean, the use of isometric viewpoint when Willow showed Hannelore around her bedroom, depicting 'movement' by having them both appear in different places around the same space. They were great.

But my big complaint is, those are rare spectacles and normally he just squeezes people into a panel in whatever order their dialogue appears, and they just move without indicating motion and end up talking to each other at strange, 70+ degree angles.

In short; Jeph has been a professional artist for over 15 years; at this point, "basic competence" shouldn't be impressive.
This is purely anecdotal, but every time I go back to QC comics from before 4000ish, the panel composition variety feels so much bigger. You can at least usually count on the background changing once, often twice, per comic. It really does a lot of work towards breaking up the visuals and keeping things feeling fresh.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the "reusing backgrounds" tendency of recent comics1 is a major contributor to why some readers (self included) feel the comic is drawn-out and samey more recently. Writing and pacing definitely plays a part, but even in scenes of the same length, different camera angles can really offer a lot of visually interesting variety.

1. I don't have sources to cite for that claim; it just feels like there are fewer perspective shifts per comic these days. Would be interesting to see an analysis if someone has one/gets curious.