One thing that’s cool about the creator of Calvin and Hobbes is that he fought against this restricting format until the newspapers granted him the whole space every time. It makes for some very visually interesting formats.
Not to point out the possibly obvious, but several Sunday strips start off with two throwaway panels, the title and the following panel. Some newspapers keep the first two panels with the rest of the strip, and some choose to omit them and only run the “main” strip panels to save space. It’s a template I see everywhere in syndicated strips.
Because of this possible omission of content, cartoonists usually design a throwaway joke for those first two panels so that if you read the strip without them, you wouldn’t really be missing anything.
Here you can totally cut out the first two panels and still get the main idea of the strip; that’s how I count and get “one” panel anyway.
Here’s another example; the first two panels aren’t necessary at all.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/06/21
One thing that’s cool about the creator of Calvin and Hobbes is that he fought against this restricting format until the newspapers granted him the whole space every time. It makes for some very visually interesting formats.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/05/16
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/05/17