Peeters parle de mise en page des cases

Four conception of the page

The conventional use of the box and the page is however far from being limited to this period of the history of the comic strip. One encounters it in the work of many authors who never were subjected to the requirements of daily publication by strips but in which, nonetheless, the page is divided into a certain number of lines of the same height (often four), themselves divided into a certain number of panels (from two to five). The overall arrangement of the page thus creates the conditions for a regular reading (from left to right and from top to bottom), very close to that of a page of writing (figures 3 and 4). This is what André Franquin has aptly named "the waffle iron."

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The most interesting uses of this principle are in any case those which, far from minimizing it, push this constancy of the framework to its limits, until a kind of fixed plane unfolds on the page. Cartoonists like Schulz, Feiffer, Brétécher, Wolinski or Copi gave remarkable examples of sequences in which the least modification in the gestures or facial expressions takes on a considerable significance because of the regularity of the units.

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Obviously, the page was designed as a concrete object which was to be made as harmonious as possible. In both cases, too, as soon as one observes the real page and not just its geometrical configuration, one notices that the effect concerned is of a simply aesthetic nature. The narrative hardly arises as a consequence of this particular arrangement; it is inscribed within a more or less predefined framework
Many spectacular effects, such as inset panels and violations of panel borders, obey a logic of this kind: far from corresponding to a true invention, they often function as simple degradations of sequential continuity, even as compensations for its poverty. It is not certain, thus, that the prodigious graphic upheavals of many comics of the Eighties and Nineties profoundly renewed the relation to narration

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It is never in itself that a page can be described as modern, it is according to the relations that it maintains with the entire comic. It is not thus a question of wondering whether a page layout is extravagant or banal, it is a question of examining the way in which a work benefits from the apparatus that it sets up.