There are many different ways to lay out the panels in a comic book, and the Nine-Panel Grid is what it sounds like: a comic page divided into nine panels. Having nine separate panels on each page makes it possible to tell a lot of story in a small number of pages by allowing for more scenes to be shown. It also can give a controlled sense of time to the story: since all of the panels are identical in size, readers will tend to move through them at a steady pace, making it easier to build up tension. It usually takes away the ambiguity in how the panel layout should be read; just go left to right, top to bottom, meaning that even people without much comic reading experience will have no trouble following the art.
There are also a lot of possible variations to the nine-panel grid by combining the panels in different ways. Leaving out any non-rectangular panels, there are 322 different ways to lay out a single page while sticking to the nine-panel grid. Comics that work primarily with the nine-panel grid will use many of these throughout the story, both to give it more visual variation and to draw more attention to scenes that take place in the larger panels.
This trope tends to be used in two different ways:
1) The book as a whole is based on the nine-panel grid, with almost all pages having some variation of the grid, drawing attention to the pages and panels that break the format.
2) A sequence is drawn in the nine-panel grid when otherwise the pages are more free flowing, packing more story into that specific page.
There are also other grid layouts, created by removing or adding rows or columns to each page. Twelve- and sixteen-panel layouts are pretty common, but nine is the most often used.
Contrast Odd-Shaped Panel, where the panels can take very weird shapes, and Splash Panel, where there are no panels at all on a page, just a large image.
Examples
- Most of The Dark Knight Returns is laid out as a sixteen-panel grid.
- Due to being a direct sequel to Watchmen, Doomsday Clock mostly follows the nine-panel grid, occasionally breaking the format to add more panels to the page or two-page spreads.
- Immortal Iron Fist #3 provides the page image, a nine-panel page showing Iron Fist zigzagging around in as he jumps from one level of a building to another.
- Very commonly used by Tom King:
- The confessionals in Heroes in Crisis are all done as a nine-panel grid, while the rest of the book is done
- Mister Miracle is entirely drawn on a nine-panel grid.
- Omega Men is drawn mostly on different variations of the nine-panel grid, with the occasional Splash Page or other panel layout.
- The Vision (2015) has a number of pages that use variations on the usual nine-panel grid, but more often uses a variation where one row (usually the bottom) is half-sized and the others are taller to compensate.
- Watchmen is done entirely on a nine-panel grid, which artist Dave Gibbons convinced writer Alan Moore to use due to the greater control of pacing that the grid allows.
