Lately, I have been thinking about the format that I use for Space Moose. The Gateway liked comic strip submissions that could be clipped and reduced to 5 by 25 cm. At first, I used any number of frames that were 10cm in height and any width as long as they all added up to 50cm (for a 50% reduction). I soon found that I could just barely fit an entire cartoon on one standard 8.5x11" sheet of paper. It took me a year (and a template from an editor) to realize that the ideal format for the submitted strips was six identical frames arranged in two rows of three. Six frames, it turns out, is just the right number to tell most of the stories and gags that I think up. In the past eight years, I have deviated from the 6-frame format only a handful of times.
Most syndicated newspaper comics seem to use a 3-frame format. The typical cadence of a 3-frame strip is one, set up, two, set up, three, punchline.
[September, 1999]
