La règle de Weisinger

Via cette page sur les conseils pour écrire un scénario de BD, cette règle que je ne connaissais pas que donne Alan Moore : jamais plus de 35 mots par case :

Alan Moore: Mort Weisinger, because he was the toughest of the editors, I thought: “Alright, I'll take his standard as the strictest”. What he said was: if you've got 6 panels on a page, then the maximum number of words that you should have in each panel, is 35. No more. That's the maximum. 35 words per panel. Also, if a balloon has more than 20 or 25 words in it, it's gonna look too big. 25 words is the absolute maximum for balloon size. Right, once you've taken on board those two simple rules, laying out comics pages – it gives you somewhere to start – you sort of know: “OK, so 6 panels, 35 words a panel, that means about 210 words per page maximum”.

Daniel Whiston: And if you've got one panel you'd have 210…

AM:…and if you've got 2 panels you'd have 105 each. If you've got 9 panels it's about 23-24 words – that'll be about the right balance of words and pictures. So that is why I obsessively count all the words, to make sure that I'm not gonna overwhelm the pictures, that I'm not gonna make – oh, I've seen some terrible comic writing where the balloons are huge, cover the entire of the background

Edgar Jacobs a eu de la chance de n'avoir jamais Weisinger comme "editor". D'un autre côté, cela confirme plutôt la valeur de cette règle.