Last week, a great article by Peter Rubin popped up on Wired.com: Why 4-Panel Comics Now Dominate Our Screens. In this examination of ‘What makes a webcomic go viral’, Rubin posits that:

Four-panel strips have been a fixture since early 20th-century newspaper comics like Mutt and Jeff and the concomitant appearance of yonkoma (“four-cell”) manga in Japan. It’s the perfect three-act-structure: You start at one end, develop conflict in the middle two panels, and resolve with a punch line at the end. But thanks to a number of factors—not least of which is the rise of Instagram and Reddit—a gridded, two-by-two variant has come to dominate the internet.

Peter Rubin, wired.com

Whilst Rubin’s article is clearly well-researched and definitely bags the incredible and recent cultural phenomenon which has been the Aliens from Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet (the erstwhile E.T’s were originally planned to feature in this week’s blog post themselves!), I keenly felt Rubin’s omission of the greatest rival to this ‘dominant’ form: The Infinite Canvas.