Comic Daily Strip

Newspaper-style 4-panel horizontal strip Newspaper-style 4-panel horizontal strip

A newspaper-style 4-panel horizontal strip. The Calvin & Hobbes / Peanuts daily format and the staple of short-form web comics.

About this size

Four panels in a horizontal row is the most constrained format in comics. Every joke, beat, or short story has to fit in four panels with no room to waste. The constraint is the discipline: classic newspaper strips routinely cram setup, development, payoff into this format multiple times a week.

The modern web-comic descendants (XKCD, The Oatmeal, Sarah Andersen) use this format heavily because it fits social media share-ability and reads cleanly on mobile.

Comic strips
Daily comics
Webcomic strips

Pro tips

1 Four panels for the four beats: setup, development, complication, payoff. Or any 4-act structure that fits.
2 Each panel is roughly square. Compositions that need horizontal sweep should pick a different layout.
3 Type-to-image ratio is high in this format. Letterers should plan dialogue placement before art is finished.