Where are the panel borders?

I don't include the panel borders on my paper line art. The reason could be filed away under "idiosyncratic pursuit of consistency" or "lunatic devotion to minute details," or both, depending on the day.

Panel borders help us read comics, distinguishing one panel from another. I could do it a few ways:

• Draw them on the paper, using a ruler (but I've groused about the quality of ruled line art before: the rigidity doesn't fit in with the rest of the art).
• Freehand them on the paper (but this would take way too long, even if I roughed out a ruled line beforehand).
• Add the panel borders digitally using, say, the Line tool (again, I feel like a digital line looks too rigid and lifeless next to my relatively rough line art).

So I want something that has at least a little "natural feeling," but I'm sure as hell not going to freehand the borders on every page. Instead, this is what I do…

Way way back in… 2012, I'm guessing… I got out a sheet of drawing paper, ruled some lines on it, and then "inked" those lines freehand, using the same Prismacolor Ebony pencil I was using for the line art. I ended up with nice, straight lines with a little natural pencil texture and some pleasing unevenness. Wham! Scanned.

I took those, tidied them up where necessary, and put them into a template PSD file. The horizontal and vertical lines are on separate layers, and I've arranged them to create the gutter size I like. I've used this same template file for every single page of DD comics since then.

I move them around the page to where they need to be, then go in and eliminate the overlapping lines using the eraser tool. This is finicky. I usually miss a few spots, which get caught in subsequent editorial passes.

And so I end up with a comic page that—to me, at least—has panel borders that live at a sweet spot between being lifelessly geometric and haphazardly organic.

Can you even see this effect on the printed page? YES! 

Could this time be better spent on other things? Couldn't I just slam some straight lines down in Photoshop, or use Clip Studio to simulate this effect? NO! This is just fine. It is a tale as old as time: we work extra-hard to make digital art look natural.

Is it worth it? Sure! Why not! I like the way those panel borders end up looking!

There you go, now you know about a weird thing that I care a lot about. Please enjoy the rest of your day.