One of the reasons why I really won’t like the Five Years Later era will be what I call The Grid: a rigid structure for the panels, assembled in a 9-panel grid where all panels have the same size.
Technically speaking Keith Giffen introduces it to the series earlier than that, on Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #60. Which is why I’m bringing it up now.
It sporadically appears earlier than that, but it’s in the last four issues of Volume 3 that Giffen begins using it consistently.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the grid, but it’s the way Giffen uses it that drives me insane.
Watchmen is often taken as the example for the grid, which it DOES use but in a completely different way.
And to explain the difference, we have to distinguish a Perfect Grid from an Imperfect Grid.
To give a concrete example: this is the first page of Watchmen #1, which clearly follows the format but it’s an Imperfect Grid because the last three panels are fused into a single one.
That makes THIS the structure of the first page.
The second page is also an Imperfect Grid, but in a different way: the first two panels of the first row are fused.
In fact, we have to wait for page 5 before we get a Perfect Grid.
In total, Watchmen #1 consists of 32 pages, of which:
28% (9 pages) are Perfect Grid
53% (17 pages) are Imperfect Grid
19% (6 pages) are in prose
There are no splash pages
It’s subtle and you don’t really notice it consciously, but this REALLY breaks up the monotony. Especially because, of those 9 pages with a Perfect Grid, you know how many are followed up by a second Perfect Grid in a row?
TWO.
All the other ones are followed by an Imperfect Grid.
Which means the layout is changing quite often. Again, it’s subtle and you don’t really notice it unless you’ve been exposed to too many Perfect Grids in a row.
To close any discussion about Watchmen being an example of The Grid, I did what no sane person would do in this situation.
I took notes on how many times Watchmen uses the grid.
On every single page.
On all twelve issues.
The Perfect Grid is more than half the issue just ONCE.
Notice that, splash pages aside, only 2 pages in Watchmen #7 are classified as not having a grid… and that’s just because they follow a different grid… which is ALSO not perfect.
Also there are NO splash pages until the last issue, where I guess they’re added to compensate the fact it’s the only issue which doesn’t end with text pages.
It also results in the last issue being the one with the lowest number of pages with a Perfect Grid (just four pages). And they’re not back-to-back.
It’s definitely a coincidence, but the ONLY issue where more than half of the pages have the claustrophobic Perfect Grid is issue 6… the one focusing on Rorschach, where the claustrophobic use of the grid does make thematic sense.
To make things simpler:
Where am I going with this and why does it matter?
THIS is how much Giffen uses The Grid in the last four issues of Volume 3.
That’s already WAY higher than what Watchmen does: there is NO BREAK FROM THE PERFECT GRID except for the splash pages, which are just at the beginning and the end of the story and therefore don’t interrupt the monotony.
Once we hit Volume 4, The Grid reigns supreme.
Which, to simplify again, means that the ONLY break we get from The Grid are the occasional splash page and the pages of text at the end, which I don’t think should even be considered part of the comic book. They’re just a bonus.
I don’t dislike the use of The Grid in general… and I think its use in the main plot of Volum 4 issue 4 works nicely, for example… but it’s so UTTERLY RELENTLESS that it restricts creativity and makes it even more depressing than the story already is.
I’m sure it’s not a problem for everyone, but for me? Flipping through pages and pages and pages of the SAME. FREAKING. LAYOUT just kills my will to keep reading.
Thanks for bringing up this contrast between the Watchmen and LSH grids.
In Watchmen the grid is presented as a baseline. Its rigidity and previsibility serves the purpose of bringing up a thematic atmosphere of sterile resignation to a dystopic society.
By reading the story we become used to a series of unpleasant or just tiresome situations that keep happening, page after page. Their presentation in a 3×3 grid reflects and encourages an expectation that things will far more likely than not happen in predictable ways that we do not want to look in much detail. Their bureaucratic predictability blunts any expectations of cause and consequence and predisposes the reader to accept a lack of agency, of any power to avoid or change undesirable situations.
The very same feeling happens in spades in the Five Years Later era of LSH, and if anything is heightened by the very dark and muted color palettes and steamroller-inspired art. Most if not all of the first twenty or so issues are very asphyxiating reading that seems to have little purpose beyond teaching us to dwell on feelings of loss and desolation.
I may be entirely off-base here, but I sure end up _feeling_ that Keith Giffen was himself uninsterested in the story that he was telling. One of the hints is indeed how rigid the use of the 3×3 grid was. It gives the subtle yet very powerful perception that Giffen himself was resigned to the hopelessness and had no motivation to ever deviate from that.
It is all not just bleak, but also very monotonous, even hostile to any interest from the reader.
Watchmen, by contrast, used very lively colors and far more attractive art from Dave Gibbons. The events were very often dire, but the characters and situations were lively and vital. And, as you well point out, the story flow was carefully peppered with deviations from the heavy bleakness for effect. The #7 panels are perfect examples; instead of a 3×3 grid we get an even more hurried 6×3 grid with very compressed panels – and then we have then being used for gentle changes of perspective to suggest acknowledgement, interest, warmth and hope. Right in the middle of the second page of #7 reproduced above we have a beautiful sequence of three panels that are rigidly separed, yet the mutual acceptance of the two characters is so powerful that they just can’t be bothered to notice the panel borders.
Those deviations are very deliberate and meaningful, playing with our perception to clearly deliver suggested levels of interest for every situation. 5YL LSH seems to have no interest in making the attempt.
Luis, thanks for pointing out the deviations of The Grid in Watchmen. As a reader at the time, I had no understanding of the art choices being made, but I did pick up on the disruption of the grid as Laurie and Dan embraced in #7. Far from being just a clever variation of the images, it’s a subtle indication of how their feelings transcend the hopelessness and resignation around them.
I also agree that Gibbons’ art was beautiful to look at with or without grids. I don’t know if Giffen lacked interest in the story he was telling; perhaps he lacked the skills and knowledge to use these tools properly. He always claimed that the nine-panel grids gave the reader more story. Perhaps, but more is not necessarily better. The Watchmen pages and your explanation of them show how powerful economy can be in story telling.
The monotony of the layout is irritating, although it’s not the full problem. Imperfect grids do still effectively exist into 5YL Legion, but the grid lines just aren’t removed. This sometimes works, like in v4 #1, where the state Braal is in is gradually revealed, but most of the time it’s just slapping lines over artwork for no reason. I do believe that The Grid makes splash panels much more effective; for example, the big ones in v4 #19 or v4 #28 would not hit nearly as hard if the rest of the issues were conventionally paneled, but I don’t believe it was entirely worth the opportunity cost.
Early 5YL also has a very bad habit of copying panels verbatim to fill out The Grid’s required panel count. v4 #5 is one of the most egregious examples of this, although I don’t know how much of it was a deliberate creative decision and how much of it was due to creating it (and 5YL as a whole) under duress.
Thanks for posting this. I now have a better understanding of The Grid and how it can be used effectively. I’d never noticed the Imperfect Grids in Watchmen before–a testament to the power of story-telling and how the mechanics are (or should be) subtle.
Maybe Giffen watched too many episodes of the Brady Bunch back in the day.
This was enormously helpful. I didn’t even like the grid used in Watchmen that much, and you;’ve ingeniously shown how much Gibbons varied it. Giffen’s monotony with it was a real problem for me in 5YL, though I suspect I liked it much more than you did.
I really felt like Giffen gave up with the art by this point. The unimaginativeness and laziness of the art in The Magic Wars four-parter was pretty shocking–some panels are little more than just sound effects, as if he couldn’t even be bothered to draw images.
He was a ceaseless experimenter, and he always wanted to try something new, as you could see in his earliest days as a penciler, when he went through his strong Jack Kirby phase What fans most loved was his strongly Jim Starlin/George Perez -influenced phase on the Legion during his first run on the title, but he couldn’t stick with that–he had to keep trying something new. So he tried his Munoz phase which the fans absolutely hated, and he most abandoned it… but his heart seemed to go out of his artwork. And then by the time of the end of the first Baxter series of the Legion he was more or less phoning it in with the nine-panel grid. By this time he was much more interested in writing, and he was spread so thin that when he ducked out of the second Baxter run on the Legion as penciller and gave over the reins to Jason Pearson (who greatly improved over time), it was a relief.
He was such a talent, but so messy a talent, and his work declined so much over time. Yet at his best there was no finer Legion artist (not even Cockrum, IMO).