by Mike Rhode (updated 10/14/2024 with additional suggestions as an addendum)
I was at a talk by Jonathan Roth this weekend, who was asking children how many panels a comics page should have. He usually defaulted to 3 or 4 in his Rover and Speck graphic novels. He asked me what the largest number ever used was... so I reached out to some comics scholar friends.
Here's some pages they came up with...
Going back to Jim Starlin's 1970's Warlock with 33 panels...
There’s a page from Paul Chadwick's Concrete where he’s swimming across the Atlantic Ocean with 150 panels...
... and that appears to be the winner at the moment, although something by Chris Ware could dethrone it, I suppose. Leave a note in comments if you have other suggestions.
So why use this many panels on a single page? What effect are these cartoonists attempting to show? Does it work?
Addendum
Paul Gravett linked to this on Facebook, and I posted it to two comics studies lists, and here's some more suggestions.
from Andrei Molotiu: The second page of Bill Griffith's "The Plot Thickens" from Raw no. 2? (60 or 61 depending on how you count "End"- MR)
from Box Brown: There's a Chris Ware page that has 177 panels...
from Alex Fitch: Apparently Absolute Batman 1 has quite a few; a couple of Liam Sharp’s Hulk issues were pretty packed with panels, and Woodrow Phoenix’s She Lives has 64 panel pages…
from JL Mast: A page I did for one of my webcomics 20 years ago! 400 small panels.
from John Bateman: Beyruth, Danilo (2012). Astronauta: Magnetar. São Paulo: Editora Panini. p. 41. I count 424 panels. Paul Gravett followed up on this and provided the image: An interesting example here from Brazil: 'The Astronaut' is a graphic novel from 2015, an adult version of a Maurício de Souza character, but real sci-fi, with lots of physics explaining astronomy. Here a full-page multiplies, first by 4 and then by more... (since it's just copying the same 9 panels multiple times, I think this has to have a qualifier - MR)
Lucio Luiz provides considerably more information for the above page's design:
I’d like to show you a page with 1,224 panels. It’s from Astronauta: Magnetar of Danilo Beyruth (it was published in some countries, but I’m not sure if it was published in English).
To give you context about the narrative, [here's] five pages (38 to 42), but the page with a lot of panels is page 41. This character is stuck in space, alone. In page 38 he starts his “day 1” with his routine. In page 39, he starts “day 2” with the same routine. And this routine goes on with page 40 repeating the same 9 panels, each time smaller. In page 41, there is 136 repetitions (the routine has 9 panels, so 136 x 9 = 1,224 panels in this page). In page 42 the sequence finishes with a single panel with “Day 146”. And that was really the 146th day because the routine appeared exact 145 times in the 4 prior pages. This scan is not very good, but in the comic, all panels, even the smallest, are well
defined. I believe it’s a great amount of panels and also a great way to
show the loneliness of the character in all these days stuck in space
(that was exactly Beyruth's intention, by the way).
Final update (10/25/24):
Aaron Kashtan: How about this strip by Mark Newgarden from Raw #6?
This is the one where the one guy has a nosebleed, and he doesn't have a tissue to stop it. And the other guy says to use a rag instead, and the first guy says "The New York Post is considered a rag" and he stuffs the New York Post into his nose.
Mark Newgarden: Aaron Kashtan I was trying to outdo Subitzky, so I must have counted.
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