Notes on the nine-panel grid in comics. Free to subscribe and read.
…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...