Paneling: How many ways can you use a 3x3 grid?

Three by Three They Came

Nine-panel pages are rare now. But they have a long and distinguished history. Steve Ditko's founding run on Spider-Man and Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen are merely the most notable.

Those examples are vital as ever, but are--I concede--old. Yet the nine-panel matrix can be the basis for a great number of page designs, as you see below.

One caution though: Don't use ones like the second (above the orange splash) that saddle the reader with a dilemma as to which panel to read next. I see a number of such here. See if you can spot a few.

Sure, you can do the lamer thing and use border-busting balloon and caption placements to guide the readers through the hiccup, but why create the problem in the first place? It's easy to avoid in the planning (thumbnail) stage.

Thanks to Erik Larsen.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2287784/in-how-many-different-ways-can-a-9-panel-comic-grid-be-used

John