I have to get back into writing in nine-panel-grid later this week. In theory it should be easy – nine-panel-grid is supposed to be essentially invisible, the equivalent of the word “said” in prose. In practise it is exhausting. I’d forgotten how exhausting. Finding up to nine images in every page that are interesting and feasible and won’t bore an artist to death. It uses up the brain. It shouldn’t! But you can’t make an artist fill a book with talking heads and fixed POV, and you can’t fill a panel with so much detail that nobody can see the story. Or so many words that the picture is covered and not able to do its own work.

Ah, to be Eddie Campbell.