Hi All,
This is question about the art and craft of making comics.

I'm starting to do a couple of pages in a 3x3 grid panel.
It looks like I'll have room for one speech bubble and a pic per panel.
Any of you have done work in 3x3 grid layouts? What did you learn? What worked? What didn't?

Someone
Action-heavy stories work well with the size of panels in the 6-panel grid, whereas denser, more dialogue-heavy stories are more at home in the 9-panel grid.

http://www.bigtimeattic.com/blog/2007/06/tips-and-tricks-writing-for-comics.html

Someone
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons used a simple 3x3 panel layout throughout their classic Watchmen. Oftentimes multiple panels were combined, or occasionally a panel was subdivided, but only three pages break from that basic grid.

http://everything2.com/user/disarmed42/writeups/panel

freefall_drift
Hi All,
This is question about the art and craft of making comics.

I'm starting to do a couple of pages in a 3x3 grid panel.
It looks like I'll have room for one speech bubble and a pic per panel.
Any of you have done work in 3x3 grid layouts? What did you learn? What worked? What didn't?

wow, that's some good referance....anyways.

the main thing with panels is the matter of pacing. 3x3 lets you slow down the story to put more focus on what the characters are saying, at the cost of making action hard to give proper effect to. i just made a comic in that array a little while ago, and i'd have to say it allows for more nuance in conversation that way.

not good for for much else though....

Having such a structured and constant layout of 3x3 panels means your comic's visuals could get boring if you don't get creative with your panel compositions . I personally wouldn't like to confine myself to such a rigid layout because I find I need some panels to be wider than others.

I would compromise and go with a 3-tier layout, but not be rigid about the size of panels within those tiers. That way panels could be wider, narrower, diagonal gutters, 'gutterless' spacing, etc as might fit with the writing.

Panels? Never heard of them =p

The Watchmen is a very good comic and it's panel layouts help it's very slow feel. Every moment feels like you are stuck with the cast for a good while and nothing is very fast paced. A good idea if you never want to venture away from that pacing.

I don't like to be limited by even the panels in my layouts though. I like the energy of the scenes to flow from panel to panel at times.

Most of my comic panel is 1(Sometime 2)X All the comic panel of episode.
That's pretty normal layout in Korea because it's a "Webcomic".
It's more easy to read because you just have to scroll down rather than change pages.

I read the watchman over the weekend. the 3x3 is a guide, not a rule. The 9 panel layout seemed for a very deliberate story.

Check this out, this is also a 3x3 grid but the author experimented with the layout.

3x3 grids I find work well with slower scenes, especially if you have thee panels of consistent size and layout with very even gutters it can set a monotonous mood, which can be appropriate depending on context. There's ways you can change things up with a 3x3 to add some interest too, like having borderless panels and playing with lighting.
When placing word balloons it can be a little tricky to put multiple balloons in the same panel and not have the layout look too busy. Personally, I like having more than one person on panel speaking at times. I think that in smaller panels multiple word balloons can be used if the characters are speaking in shorter, more concise phrases. I ought to try a little more with this layout, in most comics I make that aren't exercises I tend towards 2x3. Hey, it's a classic layout for a reason!

freefall_drift
Check this out, this is also a 3x3 grid but the author experimented with the layout.

This is a good example of the kind of thing I was trying to describe :]

skoolmunkee
I would compromise and go with a 3-tier layout, but not be rigid about the size of panels within those tiers. That way panels could be wider, narrower, diagonal gutters, 'gutterless' spacing, etc as might fit with the writing.

A lot of older comics used three tiers. You can still have a nice panel beat, but also you can change the panel width depending on importance/number of elements you need to squeeze in there. If you have three panels, let's say first one has a closeup on someone's eye and two words of text, second one has three people standing with 15 words in a caption and a third one closes up on a hand reaching for a gun, it might be wise to make the first panel narrower, the middle one largest (due to it's content and the third one... could be also narrow, if it's something that's supposed to go unnoticed by others, or you could make it wider with focus lines to imply its importance.

I've toyed with that on a 6 panel grid this summer (in my unfinished project which I'll be redrawing soon)


First panel is wider due to character's thoughts. Second is narrower as it has only a small word balloon.
Third and fourth are roughly similar, but fourth is slightly wider to fit more text.
Fifth one is kept large enough to fit the eyes while 6th one takes the rest of the width to fit in the background.

Anyway, the experiment SORT of worked, but with only 2 panels per row it's not very sensitive to what I'm doing. I'm actually pondering doing something on a 12 panel grid someday, if I can find a proper story for taht kind of thing.