My Nightmares Are In Nine Panel Grid

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Goth Christmas awaits you all, and I’m not here. I’m out with my family belatedly celebrating my daughter’s birthday. She’s now about as old as we were when we had her.

In this letter:

• Nine panel grid notes

• The News

OPERATIONS

MY NIGHTMARES ARE IN NINE PANEL GRID

Nine panel grid should be the easiest thing in the world. It came from the transition from three-panel cartoon strips to a full page. Three newspaper strips stacked on top of each other

Standard format into the Sixties - Ditko used it on SPIDER-MAN. At some point, Kirby went to six-grid (three rows of two), a shape that felt to me like a wall of old style tv screens, perfect for its time.

But by the late sixties Adams and Steranko had exploded the comics pages in America, and nothing was ever the same.

So when Dave Gibbons asked Alan Moore if they could do WATCHMEN in nine-grid, it was, among other things, a significant callback to old comics language.

The thing about the nine-grid to that point is that it was essentially invisible. It was the equivalent of the invisible word “said” that the conscious novelist uses. You don’t look at the scaffolding, you look at what’s inside it. Like “said” instead of “yelled” or “wept” or “honked,” it doesn’t call attention to itself.

Or didn’t. Until Alan, Dave and John Higgins got hold of it.

It steam-engines at steam-engine time (1), and other people were going back to grid work around the same time - Frank Miller’s sixteen-grid on DARK KNIGHT RETURNS is the obvious one. But even Miller was less showy about the grid than Alan, Dave and John. The WATCHMEN grid calls attention to itself.

Those last two panels: I don’t know what the actual technical term is, but I’ve seen it called the “match cut” - cutting to a new scene using the exact framing of the last shot of the previous scene. It had been done before WATCHMEN, but WATCHMEN used it as a central tool of the book, and it became kind of stuck to the nine pic grid. As did most of the other tools they brought to bear.

I mean, obviously, it’s marvellous. But it changed the way everyone did nine grid. It’s a statement of sophistication now, and it comes with expectations of filigree and cleverness.

(Note also that Dave draws fists just like Ditko. Note also also that I couldn’t be bothered to find and scan my own copies so I used Google Image Search, therefore some of these images have weird watermarks)

I remember Bryan Talbot showing me the raw pages of ONE BAD RAT on the train to Glasgow and explaining how it was nine-grid but he built the gutters into his calculations too, so every panel could be an exactly divisible sum of the dimensions of a nine-grid panel AND its gutters. “This one is a single nine-grid panel plus its left and bottom gutters, this one is a third of a nine-grid panel minus its top gutter.” That sort of thing.

If your brain starts to go numb reading that, it means only that you and I are normal humans and Bryan Talbot is a mysterious genius, which is nothing but true.

Like nine panel grid wasn’t hard enough already. But it’s become a certain kind of prestige showcase form.

Nine grid is harder to write than it looks. It should be the equivalent of handwriting or camera-stylo. (2), but here’s the thing. You have nine tall panels to fill on every page. Every image has to be interesting for an artist to draw. And you have to find nine of them on an average page. It can’t contain too much. Your space for dialogue is limited. You have to compose them in a certain way. If you knock out the walls of two or three panels to combine them into a larger panel, the rhythm can be knocked off. And in the ideal world the last panel on the page gives you a reason to turn the page, and you have to pace everything on the page in order to hit that beat.

(Post-Moore writers tend to default to what Eddie Campbell called page-as-stanza, every page a complete statement within the whole. So you have that looming over you or wired into your muscle memory.)

It’s fucking maddening.

Nine grid comes with expectations and discipline and generating probably twice as many interesting images than you usually do. Trying to route around those demands create tools that are tough on everyone, like Tom King’s signature repeating fixed-POV head shot. Which is not without precedent, obviously, but you need to be in tune with your artists there. It takes a writer/artist like Eddie Campbell to want to do it to themselves.

While I’m thinking about this: wanna see a trick?

Unsung miracle-worker of comics, Carla Speed McNeil, from FINDER. Nine-grid, but with a flashback panel in the top right. And that one panel is knocked out to the edges of the page and folded behind the previous panel - because it’s happening in the past. It precedes the action on the rest of the page. It’s a black and white book, so she doesn’t have access to a colour palette to differentiate that one panel. So she came up with that, which is brilliant in its simplicity.

( When I did THE WILD STORM with Jon Davis-Hunt, I had a plan: start by putting the pages on different grids and slowly loosen it across the 528 pages of the book. Starting with an early-comics tone and ending in a Wildstorm tone. I did not prepare myself for the possibility that Jon was nuts and would break the grids down into tiny fragment panels whenever he got the chance.)

This has all been brought to you by: Warren has to finish rewriting a script in nine-panel-grid and he doesn’t want to.

(1) steam-engine time

(2) Camera-stylo

ORBITAL

JOHN

DC Comics are running the following page in all their books this week.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

LTD is actually working towards a schedule these days. New post once every six hours. Books, film, music, notes, prose, whatever. Take a look sometime. It’s not a blog, really: just a personal notebook.

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Don’t worry about the things you can’t change. Hold on tight to the good things. See you next week.

W