King of the 9-Panel Grid
I've been reading a lot of Tom King recently. He's had a pretty meteoric rise since getting his start in mainstream comics.
His work on The Vision and Batman is some of the best mainstream comics going right now and his Sheriff of Babylon is already part of my best war comics head-canon after finishing up its first season last year.
One thing I've noticed about his work though is his regular use of the 9-panel grid.He uses it in a number of ways, even using it as the underlying structure in some issues. One perfect example is the "Future's End" issue of Nightwing. Whilst there are variations, the 9-panel grid underlies everything in this issue, in a similar manner to Ellis' use of it in Fell.
For those not familiar with it, the issue starts with a five-year time jump, skipping ahead of the current timeframe. Each subsequent page the jumps backwards in varying increments of time, finishing with a scene straight from Dick's origin as Robin.
The whole issue also plays with rope imagery and metaphors throughout, be this the rope of the trapeze at the end, the rope that threatens to hang Dick or the concept of the secret to a rope trick that Dick refuses to give up until he's faced with certain death. This becomes, pun slightly intended, a thread for the issue's narrative.
Apart from this, other events, concepts, themes, conversation points and tics are referenced multiple times, and it's the 9-panel grid that holds it all together. Because the grid is there in some form or another throughout the issue, there's a sense of everything linking together - a uniformity in time. Each page has its own "big" moment and the page alters its usual grid accordingly to give it the weight and space it's creators feel they deserve.
King uses the grid here as a tool for coherence. It is its own thread amid a story chock full of them.
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Links for your perusal...
A piece on Waypoint regarding the architecture in Half Life 2 and Dishonored 2 and why they feel like real cities.
Vanity Fair has this book extract about the Hollywood blacklist and the making of High Noon.
And here is that New Yorker piece on Trump, Putin, and Russia that everyone was talking about around a week ago.
///
The newsletter crossover is coming! I swear.
Until then...
His work on The Vision and Batman is some of the best mainstream comics going right now and his Sheriff of Babylon is already part of my best war comics head-canon after finishing up its first season last year.
One thing I've noticed about his work though is his regular use of the 9-panel grid.He uses it in a number of ways, even using it as the underlying structure in some issues. One perfect example is the "Future's End" issue of Nightwing. Whilst there are variations, the 9-panel grid underlies everything in this issue, in a similar manner to Ellis' use of it in Fell.
For those not familiar with it, the issue starts with a five-year time jump, skipping ahead of the current timeframe. Each subsequent page the jumps backwards in varying increments of time, finishing with a scene straight from Dick's origin as Robin.
The whole issue also plays with rope imagery and metaphors throughout, be this the rope of the trapeze at the end, the rope that threatens to hang Dick or the concept of the secret to a rope trick that Dick refuses to give up until he's faced with certain death. This becomes, pun slightly intended, a thread for the issue's narrative.
Apart from this, other events, concepts, themes, conversation points and tics are referenced multiple times, and it's the 9-panel grid that holds it all together. Because the grid is there in some form or another throughout the issue, there's a sense of everything linking together - a uniformity in time. Each page has its own "big" moment and the page alters its usual grid accordingly to give it the weight and space it's creators feel they deserve.
King uses the grid here as a tool for coherence. It is its own thread amid a story chock full of them.
///
Links for your perusal...
A piece on Waypoint regarding the architecture in Half Life 2 and Dishonored 2 and why they feel like real cities.
Vanity Fair has this book extract about the Hollywood blacklist and the making of High Noon.
And here is that New Yorker piece on Trump, Putin, and Russia that everyone was talking about around a week ago.
///
The newsletter crossover is coming! I swear.
Until then...
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