DC’s latest Watchmen cameo isn’t a character

The current crossover between DC’s Batman and The Flash titles, “The Button,” is delivering on a promise made in Rebirth #1, the title that relaunched DC’s entire line last summer. Rebirth had Batman finding a button: a blood-stained smiley-face pin recognizable to anyone who has ever read Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1987 magnum opus.

That button teased the introduction of those characters to the DC Universe, but a year on — with today’s Batman #22 marking the three-quarter mark of the crossover — the details are still fuzzy. It’s not clear which of Watchmen’s cast we can expect to return, or whether its world will truly merge with the DC Universe.

But there is one connection back to Watchmen and Rebirth #1 that is visible from the very first page of Batman #21, the first issue of the crossover. It’s not a familiar face or setting, but a piece of visual language that defines how the story is told.

Meet the nine-panel grid

Panels are the smallest unit of comics storytelling. They consist of a single image, contained within a frame, which can then be arranged in sequence with others to create a narrative.

A typical newspaper comic strip will have three or four rectangular panels, laid out in a flat row. When you come to the average page of a comic book … well, there is no average. A page can consist of a single full-page image, or dozens of tiny panels. Those panels might be stacked on top of one another, or curve around to lead the eye through the page. Each panel could be a neat rectangle, or be shaped to reflect its contents — the circle of a sniper scope, for example, or the wing of a bat.

There are an infinite number of ways to construct a comics page. But among most comics readers, creators and critics, there’s a scholarly reverence set aside for a page of one of those ways in particular. Tall rectangular panels, arranged into three rows of three. Nine panels, all of the same size, in a grid.

Watchmen wasn’t the first comic to make use of this layout, but it was notable for how rigidly it stuck to it. Almost all of its 300-plus pages used a layout based on the grid — though that doesn’t mean that every page necessarily has nine panels.

Any number of adjacent panels can be connected by knocking out the borders, or “gutters,” between them, enabling a huge variety of layouts without straying from the foundation of the grid. Take for example the page on the right, which knocks out the borders between the second and third columns to make six panels.

This makes it possible to have two disparate scenes running alongside one another on the same page. Before you read or even take in the images, your eye can immediately distinguish between the two because of the differently shaped panels they each use — a division aided by John Higgins’ colors, which use distinctive palettes for each scene.

Meanwhile, Dave Gibbons keeps the double-width panels rooted in the grid through their composition. There’s a dividing line, roughly where the erased border would be — sometimes in the staging of the panel’s elements itself (you can see what I mean by moving the slider on the image), as in the frame of the door that Laurie is leaving through in the top panel — it splits the image neatly in half. On the left, we get Doctor Manhattan in the foreground; on the right, we get Laurie, storming off into the distance.

A familiar rhythm

This is one small example of the storytelling craft that set Watchmen apart when it was first published. The book was critically acclaimed in a way that comics hadn’t really been before, landing it on Time’s list of the 100 best novels published between 1923 and 2005, and launching a thousand articles in the mainstream media about comics ‘growing up.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Watchmen has cast a long shadow over comics — so much so that even the layout used to tell its story has become sacrosanct. When a comic today adopts the nine-panel grid, you can pretty much guarantee that comparisons to Watchmen will follow.

This is what Rebirth and The Button are banking on. Simply by echoing its layout, the writers and artists behind the two stories are aiming to create a connection in the reader’s mind, conscious or not, between the core DC universe and Watchmen. Given just a few dozen pages to recreate the effect, these comics hone in on one of the ways that their predecessor used the grid: to break the comic into discrete moments.

Every comics page is a succession of frozen instants, but they could be seconds or minutes apart. The density of a nine-panel grid allows for a consistent rhythm. The smallest movement, of Batman turning over the smiley badge in his hand, can be broken into parts, each like a frame of celluloid.

In Watchmen, this effect was equated with the ticking of a clock. In Batman #21, there is a literal timer in the corner of each panel, counting down one second at a time. This tick-tock rhythm is the heartbeat of Watchmen’s universe, as recognizable as the “Be My Baby” drum beat.

This torch hasn’t been picked up by subsequent parts of the crossover, as the middle chapters have strayed away from Watchmen and towards becoming a sequel to Flashpoint, the last DC crossover to reset the company’s setting, with 2011’s New 52. Given the change in focus, it makes sense, but it feels like a failure to deliver on the promise of Rebirth #1 — which put the nine-panel grid front and centre. Or, more accurately, front and back.

Rebirth has two bookending sequences, which change format with each page turn. The opening goes from nine panels to four and then two, arranged in layouts that break the grid entirely. Layouts that are closer to the visual language of most modern DC books.

Around the turn of the millennium, books like Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority popularized a style of comics storytelling known as ‘decompression’. This was an attempt to create a more cinematic effect in comics by paring back the amount of stuff crammed into them. Decompression was typified by ‘widescreen’ panels, stacked two or three to a page.

By switching from the nine-panel grid to a widescreen format, Rebirth transitions between two very different styles of storytelling, between two eras twenty or thirty years apart, between two worlds. The effect is almost like passing through an airlock, the air slowly decompressing around you as you read.

Beyond Watchmen

Of course, there are other benefits to the nine-panel grid than being reminiscent of Watchmen. The format is currently enjoying a small renaissance, appearing notably in The Wild Storm, Warren Ellis’ return to the universe he helped put on the map with The Authority, and Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s The Wicked + The Divine. But if you had to name one person who has dragged the grid back into conversation, it is undoubtedly Tom King.

King is the writer of Batman #21 (and on the title generally), but he has been deploying the grid for far longer. It crops up in the preceding issues of Batman, in his Iraq War comic Sheriff of Babylon, and in the book that established him as the inheritor of the nine-panel crown, Omega Men.

Omega Men is a twelve-part sci-fi story about a terrorist cell waging war on a totalitarian government, drawn entirely — with the exception of one issue — by Barnaby Bagenda, using the nine-panel grid. The book is so preoccupied with the format that the series actually ends on a discussion of it.

“It’s weird. I’d stare at them, the grids, they looked like something… familiar,” says Kyle Rayner, Omega Men’s lead character, who was a comics artist before becoming a Green Lantern.

“It’s a cage, right? They’re just bars on a cage.”

He’s got a point. The panels are claustrophobically narrow, with just enough room for one character at a time. Kieron Gillen, writer of the aforementioned The Wicked + The Divine, calls the grid “a pretty brutal, symmetrical, bullying format”.

When the grid is used the way that Omega Men and Watchmen use it, consistently for hundreds of pages, the repetition “pushes into your consciousness,” Gillen says. The effect can be oppressive.

Which makes it all the more satisfying when the comic breaks free of its cage.

Breaking free

For its first eleven issues, Watchmen resists using what is known as a splash page — an entire page dedicated to a single image. So when #12 opens with six splash pages in a row, all depicting the destruction of New York, it’s gratuitous, but one of the comic’s most memorable moments. The format of the pages is as alien to the reader as what’s being shown on them, because it’s a sudden change in rhythm.

Batman #21 attempts a similar trick, ending on a full-page splash that shows the destructive aftermath of the issue’s events, but it’s much less impactful. Not only because the comic has just twenty pages to establish its rhythm but also because, in that short time, it has already broken the grid three times.

As a modern comic, from the post-decompression era, Omega Men is equally partial to a nice big splash page. But its ninth chapter — and, again, of course it’s the ninth — breaks the grid in what might be the single smartest use of the nine-panel grid in comics to date.

Each page of Omega Men #9 has one less panel than the last. The panel borders are knocked out, one at a time, starting with the top row and working left to right, then down to the next row, the way your eye does as it reads. It’s counting down — nine, eight, seven — and as the issue progresses, it becomes clear what this is a countdown to.

By the time the page count has dropped to one, we see one of the Omega Men clutching a bomb to his chest. When you turn the page again, it’s like pushing the plunger on a detonator, as the countdown hits zero and a planet gets the Alderaan treatment. The explosion spans two pages, the midpoint of the issue, where the staples would be if you were reading this as a single issue.

But there’s still half a comic left, and so the panel count inevitably ticks back up — seven, eight, nine — until the status quo is restored.

Comics is a serialized medium where the status quo is king, one that has been publishing monthly for the best part of a century. And the ones doing the publishing are businesses, with bottom lines and shareholders. For better or worse, once a successful pattern has been established, it is bound to return eventually. Whether it’s a popular setting or cast of characters, or even a way of telling stories, the pattern might be broken, might go away for a little while — but rarely forever.

As a reader, the best you can hope for is that creators find new and inventive ways to employ those patterns. That they find something to say with them, more than just ‘remember this?’ It’s not yet clear which camp The Button is destined to fall into. Nor whether it will find a respectful way to integrate Watchmen’s characters and ideas, thirty years on. Batman #22, out today, will continue the story, and the crossover will conclude with The Flash #22 on May 17. With each issue, each page, each panel, we’re getting closer to the answers.

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Alex Spencer is a writer about comics, games, technology, pop music and his dog, based in London. You can find him wrestling Twitter's character limit @AlexJaySpencer.