Panel Grids: 6, 9, 16...?

[dewline]

Some comic books I've read over the years distinguished themselves by sticking as closely as possible to a "grid" system of panel layout. The "base" number of panels would vary from artist to artist, book to book, but within a book, it would almost never vary unless you really wanted an attention-getter moment in the book in question. Ditko-era Spider-Man, Watchmen, Miller's first Dark Knight series, Legion of Super-Heroes during the "Giffen-Bierbaum-Squared" era...these stand out as some of the best examples of the method I recall reading to date.

So, I've got a question to throw out to you to answer with your opinions: Is this a method of layout for beginners to stick to as a survival tool, or hardcore pros to show how they really excel under self-inflicted pressure, or both?

Comments

[miraclo.livejournal.com]

I'm going to add to the press of support for a grid system. We went through a period where such structure was eschewed by many, and IMHO the results were far more negative than positive. Hard rules are always going to be problematic, but in general I'd say that beginners should stick to a standard panel grid -- the number of them depending upon the scope and pace of the tale and the economics of the situation (ie how many pages they have available to tell a tale) -- and leave it to seasoned professionals to decide when it's best to break out of it for a particular emphasis. I prefer an early or a closing splash page at a story-appropriate point, but otherwise for it to be a good, bounded flow.

The early Image-era comics were a horror of nearly every page being a "money shot" of some sort, and due to the peculiarities of the speculator market at the time we had a generation of new artists come up through it thinking that's the way it's supposed to be done. I clearly recall a short stretch in the 1970s when it was obviously an editorial mandate at Marvel to plant a two-page spread in the middle of the comic whether or not the story really benefited from it.

If nothing else, the return to at least a six-, much better a nine-panel standard layout would help us get back to having a fighting chance of having an issue's worth of material back inside a single issue rather than thinly spread out over two, three, four or more issues. The current system is producing lazy writers and appears to be mostly at the behest of the publishers, constantly looking for story arcs to be produced at trade-friendly lengths of pages. That in itself isn't a problem, but stories that should be handled inside a single issue are being turned into multi-issue arcs, and notions that the expansion are a sign of today's story telling being more sophisticated are often laughable. Too often the space is being handled poorly.