Four Panels and a Small Act of Faith

On the quiet discipline of drawing the same strip, day after day, for fifty years

There is a particular courage in sitting down each morning to fill four small panels with ink. Not a mural, not a canvas stretched six feet wide — just four modest rectangles of newsprint, the daily strip, the most intimate art form there is.

The Discipline of the Small Canvas

I spent two winters studying originals at the Little Panel Archive, sitting before glass cases of eleven-by-five-inch boards. A single wobbly ink line for a mouth carries more sadness than any oil painting. The constraint was the entire point.

Every morning, the same four empty boxes — and the terrifying possibility that nothing will come.

Same characters, same four-panel grid — but each day a different small truth. The football that never gets kicked. The kite tangled in the same tree. Repetition as ritual, ritual as meaning.