- Some basic Sequential Art theory - 

Many academics refer to comics as a bastard medium, a mixture of writing and art.

I think this is wrong.

Comics, BD, whatever you call them, are visual narratives, stories told with a broad visual vocabulary. Not limited to simply one symbolic system of visual communication such as text OR pictures OR symbols, they can tell a story in ways words or pictures or any other more limited visual medium can’t. The strongest and most potent Sequential Art, using representative & abstract symbols can communicate in just a few frames what would take a writer paragraphs to pages to do, a single painting could never.   
There is quite a lot of theory at this point about the right and wrong ways to structure a comic, different schools of thought and style. If you wish to peruse the medium I’d suggest you remain open to all of them, they each have something to offer the student of Sequential Art.

 For the purposes of a Comix Jam it's best to start by keeping things fairly simple, so I think the most helpful to keep in mind are these... 

- Show and Tell - 

If the cup is cracked and dirty, draw a cracked and dirty cup, no need to mention it at length in text, you will only be repeating your self. Readers will absorb facts automatically when they see them in a drawing, leaving you free to highlight slight details or simply find the right words for the story at that moment and let the pictures tell their part. OR, you say it, and keep the art simple, abstract. Either way keep it simple and clear. 

If you want to bring special attention to the state of the cup you can mention something, but I find it to be more subtle to compose the panel so as to cause the reader to dwell on the cup, noticing these details for themselves.  

You could have a character pick up the cup and consider it, or run a finger over the cracks.  

This could be conveyed by several panels of art, animating the character picking up the cup, considering it, running a finger over the cracks. - or - By just a few panels of art and the right words, describing the character’s experience of the cup.  Perhaps a Haiku of text accompanying three panels, one line of the Haiku for each describing the service. There are many ways to go about this.

Either way the reader will imagine the way a cracked cup feels on his or her own fingertips. The character could even address their host...”you don’t do dishes much do you” and the reader will imagine the texture of an old cracked cup that has not been washed properly in a long time. To accompany this line you could cut to a picture in that panel of a sink overflowing with dishes, adding another layer of information to the story.... get the picture?

- Page layout -

 In a jam there are no rules, in fact the idea is to stretch or break the rules of graphic narratives, but it helps to understand those rules in the first place. So just in case here are the basics.

Firstly, most people read from the top left corner of the page to the bottom right, either left to right or up and down.

There are exceptions but for the purposes of a jam you don’t want to confuse the order of the images to much and if a pattern, traditional or otherwise has been adopted by the artist before you on the page then try to maintain it as breaking it will tend to shatter the narrative.

A good general rule of thumb is that if it seams at all awkward for you to read then it will be to someone else as well.

Generally its good to avoid staggering the panels at irregular points on the page, arranging them in complicated zigzagging patterns or anything other than a visually consistent manner. It's quite possible to mess with these rules but if you are going to use an unconventional page layout then be sure to include some kind of mechanism to indicate the order in which you want the readers to view the panels.

For example devices commonly in use are arrows, trails, 'snakes and ladders' or other integrated design elements, and connected chains of word balloons.

When starting your panel(s) keep in mind that you are adding a brick to the composition of the page that should constructively add to the whole.

Try to avoid drawing off the papers edge, or leaving unusable blank chunks of space unless it adds to the overall or gives an effect you desire. If you want the pacing or beat of your panel to remain consistent with the other panels then use the same amount of gutter space (gutters are the empty spaces between the panels). You can alter the pacing or beat by changing the size of your gutters, a wider gutter tends to imply a longer beat. The larger the gutter the more isolated the moments on either side of it, the longer the beat. In the extreme you can give your panel a sense of stillness if you place it well away from the other panels or on a blank page all alone. Conversely the closer together the panels are the more clipped the pacing and the faster the beat, thus giving the impression of time moving quickly.

The most extreme example being panels that in fact overlap each other. It helps to keep in mind that in effect gutters represent time passing between each moment in the narrative, in part this comes from the relative time it takes the eye to move from panel to panel.

Detail or the lack of it can also effect a sense of time, extremely detailed art taking more time to absorb and as a result normatively 'moving' slower than a simple and clean image.

However if you take a very simple image and place it in a large panel with large gutters you usually create a sense of stillness and of large space equating in most readers minds a frozen moment or extreme isolation.

- Juxtaposition -

 The engine of story telling in comics is the panel-to-panel process of juxtaposition. It is with this process that the sense of motion, time passing, or any other kind of narrative effect is chiefly achieved. It is the area of study within the form that takes artists the longest to refine usually but listed below are the six most recognized types of transitions. In order to take part in a comix jam a participant must at least understand one or two of these, if not then they will not be able to carry on a narrative in any way that is constructive.  

1-The Talking Head, panel-to-panel, action-to-action, moment-to-moment Type: Very little changes, like looking at a strip of film, each frame only slightly different from the last. I.e.: Doonesbury (especially early on).

2-The Action 2 Action Type: A single or multiple events depicted before and after the event horizon: A speeding car - the car slamming into a tree: A kung-fu fighter's foot flying through the air - his foot hitting another fighter’s head.

3-The Subject to Subject Type: multiple images juxtaposed to create the impression of an event: A runner reaching the Finish line - a close up of a stop watch stopping: A killer attacking a victim - a shot of a skyline with a scream coming from the city.

4-The Scene-to-Scene Type: Transitions that take us from one moment or place to another: A man on a phone saying "he can't hide forever..." - A house with the caption 'ten years later'. Effectively a cinematic 'CUT TO'.

5-The Aspect to Aspect Type: Bypasses time for most part and sets a wandering eye on the 'location' or subject, good for setting a mood: A Christmas tree - snow falling on a window sill - a log in the fire: A pitcher of beer - an ashtray full of buts - a gun laying on an old oil rag.

6-The Non-Sequitur Type: Groups of many images together that are wildly divergent in content and seemingly visually unrelated. Highly abstract but can set a mood or convey a less linear idea: A satellite flying through space - a farmer and his wife in front of their home - Mickey Mouse's hands.

- Leave something to the imagination -

 As in a novel - where all the images are painted in the readers mind by the writer’s words utilizing the reader’s own imagination to tell the story - the same can be done in a comic. But in a comic we have more choice in what the readers bring to the story!  

Automatically all sounds are imagined, at best written as automatapia Sound FX. You can use those to great effect, trying to match real sounds or completely go the other direction and use nonsense sounds.

“raflap” “baffabump” Tooberdoo”

You can take the mediums inherent ‘silent’ state and have your characters mime the story, allowing the reader to write their own dialog, even their own personal interpretation of the story.  

The characters can react to things off panel – IE: An ugly man never fully show so the readers own imagination paints something far more gruesome that you could ever draw. Taken as a fake out this was a classic EC comic (TALES FROM THE CRIPT) tool to pull a gotya’ at the end of many of their stories, letting the reader make assumptions about the character until the last panel, making a point with the story about the assumptions we make every day in society. 

If you show the ugly man on the following page this is called a 'reveal'. Basically playing peekaboo with the reader you can build in a surprise this way, lead the readers to one set of exceptions and then give them something else, like for example, the ugly man is really Fabio.

The images can be more abstract, out of focus or nonfigurative, leaving more of the visuals up to the reader’s interpretation. This can be done with experiments in drawing mediums, try using brushes & ink, dried markers, dark graphite or charcoal, crayons. For the Jams just keep in mind that the art has to me B&W photocopy friendly, light pencil won’t show and colours with convert to their gray tonal values. 

You can focus on macro-details, never pulling back to see the whole scene, only showing hands, a mouth, feet, the dirty cup.....the dialog could be a conversation between the characters or an inner narrative or of a seemingly unrelated nature, a cooperative reader will still combine the words and images and find meaning no mater what you do, they may even find more meaning in this than in anything more traditionally narrative.  

Abstraction is your friend.