Pictured: a page from Chester Brown’s sadly uncollected partial adaptation of the Gospels
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about comics that use grids. What’s especially interesting to me right now are stories that use one grid layout exclusively. Chester does it in Louis Riel, parts of the Gospel stories and some of his autobio work with six panels, and the Hernandez Brothers have done it with both six and nine panels. There are many others – Jordan Crane, Alex Toth, Jacques Tardi, etc – who also do this at times, but in my mind Chester is one of those that does it especially well.
In my own work, I’m starting to see the grid as a kind of formal challenge – you can’t use panel size or splash pages or anything to emphasize or de-emphasize given images and story elements. Just a constant, rythmic flow of panels that can strip away everything but the narrative if done right.