Long before television, but after newspapers started printing, illustrated stories told through sequential photos and panels became genuinely popular. That’s really where the whole form starts. This way of telling a story through images got a name: comics, or strips. By the 2000s, most of these stories had been remade as films, in formats like HD and 3D, action-heavy enough that younger generations know the characters mainly from the screen: Superman, Spider-Man, Hulk and so on.
The part worth dwelling on is the structure itself: a story told across a small grid, four panels, each one advancing the action. A kid plays with a dog, throws a ball, the dog catches it, the dog brings it back. Something is clearly happening, movement carried panel to panel.
Now that Instagram has made everyone a photographer, cameras good enough for anything, we’ve taken that same four-panel structure and mostly used it to reduce it to four nearly identical shots of the same face making the same expression. Speaking with total honesty, which is admittedly my worst trait, I have zero interest in seeing more of that particular genre.
If there’s a version of this format I’d actually want to see: something happening in the background across the panels, an explosion, anything with motion, rather than the same face repeated four times in a row.
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