Beat Panel

"DID YOU SEE THOSE TWO BEAT PANELS
THEY WERE CRUCIAL TO THE JOKE"

— Yelling Bird, Questionable Content

A silent panel in Sequential Art. Usually the next-to-last panel in a serialized comic strip, since it approximates the comedic pause before a punchline.

Particularly efficient comic artists may copy and paste adjacent panels, since the point of the Beat Panel is usually that the characters are frozen in contemplation. Another variation is to have two beat panels, with just a quizzical change of expression in the second to show a character's confusion (more likely to happen in a four-panel strip than a three-panel strip). It can also be unusually long to indicate a long beat.

Compare Silent Scenery Panel. A Beat is the (un)spoken version. Not to be confused with Narrative Beats.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Azumanga Daioh:
  • The manga of uses these a lot, often at the end of the comic when the gag is a lack of action. These usually translate to (often hilarious) stretches of awkward silence in the anime. One of the more memorable ones:
    Panel 1: Chiyo: Oh, Sakaki, you're here already! It'll be an hour before the others get here!
    Panel 2: Sakaki: It's okay... I'll wait outside... with Mr. Tadakichi...
    Panels 3 and 4: [the same image of Sakaki, perfectly content, sitting under a tree with Mr. Tadakichi]
  • An example of how they translate this: in the anime, during the same scene, the camera stays focused on Sakaki as every other main character walks into Chiyo's house.
• Witchcraft:
  • This Hentai manga uses it to great comedic effect. Kagami is trying to get Kaoru to relax so she can effectively hypnotize him (Mildly NSFW text):
    Kagami: Well, the easiest way is that relaxed state right after ejaculation. All right, ejaculate.
    Kaoru: Right...
    [beat panel]
    Kaoru: ... ... Ejaculate?
    Kagami: Yes.
    Kaoru: You mean where it ... squirts out?
    Kagami: That's right. Now hurry up.
  • Later in the same comic, Sara hypnotizes Kaoru into "raping" Megumi as punishment for Megumi's Heel–Face Turn. Several panels with Sara looking increasingly distressed and a caption of "thirty minutes later" with nobody feeling particularly punished, Sara finally tells them to cut it out.
• Happens in Corsair manga, where the princess of a powerful pirate group finally announces to her family that she intends to wed their mysterious and very pretty strategist, Kanale (or Canale... Or Kanare... take your pick). Cue their right-hand Master Swordsman, Ayase, who rarely shows any emotion at all, speak the following:
  Ayase: I never said I approved (of you choosing Kanale). In fact there's another problem before all this: Kanale already belongs to me.
  [the silence goes on for multiple panels]
• There's one early on in the Battle Royale manga. Shuya asks Noriko how she can trust him so easily. She says "You didn't peek at my panties." Cue the ellipsis and possibly the only funny moment in the story.
• Lone Wolf and Cub probably sets a record. The last chapter contains the same Beat Panel eight times across multiple pages. It underscores how dramatic the moment is; the implication is that the moment was practically endless for all watching.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: In Spotlight: Trailcutter, Whirl uses three identical Beat Panels to "imitate" Tailcutter's "grotesque Forcefield Face." Whirl is a faceless Empurata victim.
• Baki the Grappler:
  • Taken to an extreme in Baki Dou. When Motobe visits Yuujiro (essentially the most powerful and undefeatable creature on Earth) and warns him that Musashi is too strong an opponent for him, we get a whole page of nothing but identical beat panels, depicting Yuujiro's face with a look that says "this is the single dumbest thing I've heard in my entire life."
  • Happens again in a later chapter, when Donald Trump learns that each president of the United States must swear an oath of non-aggression to Yuujiro. The result is a whole page of beat panels depicting Trump's incredulous face.

Comic Books

• Christopher Priest (comics) might well be the Trope Codifier. Quantum and Woody, Black Panther, and pretty much everything else he wrote were rife with beat panels. The impressive thing was that as often as he used them, they never got stale or overdone; he knew exactly when and where to use them.
• The Keith Giffen/J. M. DeMatteis comedy incarnation of Justice League used this all the time, sometimes featuring entire Beat Pages.
• J.M. DeMatteis's run on Spectacular Spider-Man featured a beat page — but it wasn't funny, rather it was one of the creepiest pages ever seen in a comic book.
• Used excessively in Invincible, then Lampshaded when the main character gets his comics signed by an artist who comments on his use of copying and pasting panels.
• In the comic Teen Titans, after Beast Boy asked Raven to go with him on a "not-a-date", there was a beat panel before Raven said "Let's go".
• In an Invincible Iron Man issue, Pepper Potts admits to Maria Hill that she slept with Tony. A shocked Maria Hill admits that she also slept with Tony a few days before Potts. Follows a succession of panels with both looking shocked, each at each other, and then each looking down, visibly angry. After that, Hill mutters a simple "Tony Stark. Tony fucking Stark."
• One of the traditions of a super team crossover is having a few B-List (or even major) villains crash the headquarters seeking revenge, then a beat panel as they realize there are quite a few more super heroes than they expected.
• Peter David enjoys regular use of these. The Madrox mini-series contained a number of examples.
• In Scott Pilgrim, Scott asks Wallace what the website for Amazon.ca is. Wallace gets his beat panel with a dumbfounded look and a series of ellipses and responds ".... Amazon.ca".
• During the Joss Whedon run on Astonishing X-Men, the morning after Peter Rasputin and Kitty Pryde finally make love, they meet with Wolverine in the kitchen. Two beat panels follow; one where Wolverine looks at Peter, and one where he looks at Kitty. He then returns to his breakfast, muttering, "'Bout time."
• Two separate pages of these in the Twilight Sparkle Micro Series issue, indicating the awkward silence between Jade and Twilight during their meals.
• Kevin Maguire specializes in multi-panel closeups of characters trying not to break down in laughter. ^note  He was the artist for part of the Keith Giffen/J. M. DeMatteis run on Justice League.
• A noticeable, though not exactly comedic, example occurs in The Wicked + The Divine. Annie tells the cops not to follow her, immediately turns into Badb and threatens them, and then dissolves into crows. After that happens, everybody stares at where she was standing for a moment before a total riot breaks out.
• Brian Michael Bendis is fond of using beat panels. One example in Invincible Iron Man has Tony Stark holding out his hand for Doctor Strange to high-five him for four panels before the Sorcerer Supreme reluctantly gives in, prompting Stark to shout "Awesome facial hair bros" to Strange's dismay.
  • Bendis likes beat panels so much he practically gave it one of his characters as a superpower. Miles Morales has a Venom Blast that activates a few seconds after physical contact with an opponent. Said foe will maybe be a little confused as to why Spider-Man just finger-poked them, then spasm wildly as the bioelectric stock courses through their system. All while Miles watches on with his big white spider eyes. In another indicator of the sheer Bendis-ity of this, the Venom Blast takes effect instantly under nearly every other creative team who's used Miles.
• In The Powerpuff Girls story "Powerful Pretty" (DC #36), Bubbles' face is smeared with makeup (part of a Sedusa plot). When she turns to Buttercup, there is a beat panel of Buttercup staring in disbelief, followed by a panel of her laughing her head off.
  • "Like It Or Lumpkins" (DC #33) shows two beat panels of Fuzzy Lumpkins standing on his "propitty" after chasing the girls off—they came to retrieve a Mojo Jojo device that had landed on Fuzzy but Fuzzy says it's his since it landed on his property. After the two beat panels, the girls return:
  Girls: Pleeeeease?!?
  Fuzzy: Ah said gitt!!
• Happens twice in Sonicthe Hedgehog Mega Man Worlds Collide whenever somebody gets confused about the two characters named Shadow Man (One is the robot master from Mega Man 3, the other is the roboticized Shadow the Hedgehog.)
  • The first time is when Eggman and Wily opt to send Shadow Man at the Heroes... both of them.
    Eggman: Still, I'm sending Shadow Man to intercept our main problem.
    Wily: You mean... my Shadow Man or our Shadow Man?
    (beat, with Eggman and Wily glancing at each other with an eyebrow raised)
    Both doctors: Both!
  • The second time, it's Sonic and Mega Man confronting the robots, and their names being the same causes confusion between the heroes.
    Sonic: Okay, I've got the naming convention down. You're—
    Sonic and Mega Man, at the same time: Shadow Man!
    (beat, with robot and hedgehog giving each other confused glances).
• Beasts of Burden: At the end of "The Gathering Storm", after the gang has just been sworn into the Wise Dog Society as junior apprentices, most of them suddenly realize that they need to get home and practically trip over each other rushing off. There's a panel of the remaining characters (Red, Emrys, Miranda and the Orphan) silently watching them go before the Orphan dryly remarks, "I feel safer already."
• Loop: After the blue twin tries to attack her sister in the past but ends up just leaving her alone in the present, the red twin is left just standing there alone for a couple panels, letting the failure sink in.

Comic Strips

• Pretty much every comic has used this at some point. It's been around since the early days of comics, but it really took off in the '60s and '70s, when a new generation of cartoonists raised on films and television sought to make their comics more cinematic. Doonesbury is often credited with popularizing the beat, and it remains one of the most frequent users of this trope.
• A comic strip by David Lynch was almost entirely made up of beat panels. The same ones. For ten years.
• Life in Hell occasionally uses these to an extreme. Matt Groening refers to these as "all those Akbar and Jeff strips where they stare at each other." Keep in mind there were often dozens of panels to a page.
• Herman used this panel often, and sometimes so many at once that only one panel had any dialogue in it.
• Interestingly, The Far Side occasionally pulled this off in a one-panel strip. The visual was some awkward situation, while the punchline came in the caption.
• Discussed as well as demonstrated in this Barney & Clyde strip seen here.
• A frequent occurrence in Concyt, usually involving either Conchy or Oom Paul pondering whatever idiocy or insanity has just been presented to them before passing wry judgement.
• Sometimes happens in Retail. In this strip, Cooper even asks if the trope is overused.

Fan Works

• ''Defragmentation: One comic has a dialogue-less panel between Pink catching Spamton going through their wallet and Spamton deciding to Eat the Evidence.

Video Games

• The World Ends with You, due to its manga-like cutscenes, is a rare Video Game example. The game has this exchange in week three with several Beat Panels
  Beat: We ain't treading on thin ice! Shibuya's not cold enough for ice!
  Uzuki: .....
  Kariya: .....
  Neku: .....
  • What really sells this is that all three of the people after Beat's comment are a Deadpan Snarker ensemble, and none of them have a comeback to that.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has quite a few moments where everyone sits in silence after what the witness has just said.
  Phoenix: .....
  Edgeworth: .....
  Judge: .....
  Everyone Else: .....

Web Comics

• 2P START! features the mighty April Fools Day comic known as A Conversation, which may just be one of the tallest strips in existence due to the sheer number of beat panels it contains.
  "It's a trifecta. The comic tests the site's bandwidth, your patience, and my sanity."
• In A Moment of Peace there are three entire pages of "Awkward Pause" following Ito's declaration of love.
• Project 0 interestingly enough on page 8 of part 1.1 and page 8 of part 1.2.
• Refined into an art by Achewood except that it usually happens in the final panel to highlight an awkward silence or just something bizarre getting a bewildered reaction. Here is a good example for you to enjoy.
  • Parodied by xkcd in this tribute.
  • Taken to comedic extremes here.
• Used often in The Optimist to represent listening, waiting, pausing to consider, watching TV, drawing, consideration & reconsideration, boiling with rage, waiting for acknowledgement, disbelief, and scowling.
• Adorable Desolation uses the Beat Panel often, two examples are here and here
• Bob and George is famous for the third panel pause. Naturally, it gets lampshaded (along with one of the author's more common comic formulae) in the course of the comic.
  • Especially this strip, which had a three-panel pause.
• Cyanide and Happiness uses this, frequently. Very frequently.
• Death To The Extremist uses this constantly. Often exaggerated with comics like this.
• El Goonish Shive uses this when Grace explains the plan to cure Elliot of his problem.
  • Also, Tedd and the spilled barrel of exposition, Nanase talking about Ellen with Susan. Grace realizing she had to break her "morphing moratorium", Ellen coming back to Earth and informed of the Elliot's upcoming powers and "Man Engulfs Food" looking at dining Grace.
  • Once turned into gag in its own right.
    And now, by popular demand, Jeremy, the creature nature never intended in his own comic!!!!!!!!
  • "Maybe you just think a woman can't be physically strong without turning into a man."
  • Gary: Oh, I'm terribly sorry! I didn't mean to be rude, it's just I used to think you didn't want to go on a second date with me because I was too geeky.
    [beat panel]
    Nanase: Yes, it was entirely because I was a lesbian.
    Gary: Phew! Well, ain't that a boost for my fragile ego!
  • This page is composed mostly of beat panels. It opens with Elliot sitting on the couch in a shocked pose due to his realization that Sarah is like a sister to him. He breaks pose slightly to make a quick phone call to Ellen, and then promptly returns to his prior shocked pose.
  • Another one here where Tedd projects an air of confidence that they're not really feeling.
  • The Emisary reacts this way to Grace's explination.
• Flipside makes heavy non-comedic use of beat panels to represent contemplation and tension, to the point where most of a given day's strip may occur in total silence. As just one example, this page in chapter 59 has only two dialogue panels in a seven-panel strip ... the rest is pondering and anticipation.
• Flying Man and Friends alternates between having the beat panel at the end of the strip and having it somewhere in the middle.
• Folly and Innovation does this on occasion
• Likewise, Garfield Minus Garfield seems to thrive on the beat panel.
• Girl Genius manages two in a row with different responses. Another one, courtesy of Sleipnir O'Hara.
  • A Running Gag with characters realizing what they just said — Moloch, Agatha and Tarvek.
  • When these airshipmen find the perfect extra bit of unnecessary weight to loose Here and Tarvek and Gil come to realize just how good an argument can be made for the dingbots having the spark here it's an unspoken punchline.
  • When Gil and Captain Vole discuss the false Heterodyne heir.
    Vole: De pipple of Mechanicsburg vould not ekcept [shutting down Castle Heterodyne] as proof dot she iz a Heterodyne.
    Gil: No, neither would my father.
    Vole:...not unless she danced nekked through de ruins vile trying to shoot down de moon, turned all de tourists into monsters—and den built a very dangerous fountain out of sausages.
    [beat]
    Gil: Well... yes, that goes without saying.
• Goblins does this sometimes. The best example is probably Minmax here.
• Head Trip doubles up on the beat panels in this strip because, well, as that particular chapter of Breaking Dawn put it, "There Are No Words For This".
  • Also, this:
    Hot Topic Avenger: The acceptable pause for a punchline has passed, meaning either you're serious or you suck at telling a joke.
  • And this.
  • Another double beat panel when Mal "cheers up" a chat room full of Fan Dumb.
  • Mal is good at causing this.
• Used in full by Hello Earthling, and regularly too. Perhaps the most abusive example on this trope is here.
• Irregular Webcomic! does this very often.
  • Another strip has a News Post in which Morgan-Mar explains that he tried to avoid it (putting the silent panel earlier), but it just wasn't funny.
  • Another one does three- and a Lampshade Hanging. The "Shakespeare" strip after that is entirely Beat Panels, possibly going for Overly-Long Gag.
  • Inverted here, with the 3rd panel the only one with dialog.
  • Dare I suggest that here, he's going for an entire beat -strip-?
  • ExaggeratedTrope: why have a beat panel, when you can have five?
• Matt Groening's Life in Hell uses these quite a lot, especially in the strips featuring Akbar and Jeff. Here◊ is a typical example.
• Lotus Cobra Is Evil: By Visible Silence in "Favorite Zendikar Card"◊, as said by Cobra Commander.
• Here is a Heroic BSoD version from Megatokyo.
  • You don't have to go far to see this version: the very first strip also has a Beat Panel.
  • Three times in a row, two of those double panels.
• Millennials has a few examples of awkward copy/pasted silence, like this one [1] where the audience gives the speaker the silent treatment creating a super awkward moment.
• My Middle Name's Adventure has been employing this since the first strip.
  • But most notably in strips with Amed. [2]
• The readers of Narbonic refer to this as the "Silent Penultimate Panel", specifically when the next-to-last panel is the one that is the Beat Panel. Done often enough that one of the regular readers of Narbonic Director's Cut maintains a running total.
• The Order of the Stick has a lot. "It seems unlikely". More good news. "How cute!" And a double when Roy x Miko ship sinks for good.
  • The prequel book On The Origins Of PCs had a page with eight of these in a row, culminating in an outburst. It fit the situation perfectly.
• There is an absolutely epic final panel beat in strip this Partially Clips strip.
• Nice little parody in Penny Arcade.
  • Elsewhere: played straight!
• Questionable Content uses them all the time
  • This filler strip has two of them, and Lampshade Hanging.
• Realfield frequently subverts this by removing the punchline altogether. Trust me, it's funny.
• Sequential Art has its share of beat panels. Like with Kat looking at Art's art and the next comic, this or Iron-Pip, Art and colleague or this, with poor Kat... And now Art and Pip. Later, with Hilary and her foxy "new contact".
  • Also, used as a punchline.
  • Or, one of squirrel girls notices Martian Trash Cans hunting for Art —
    Violet: [panically] A bad, floaty, shooty, tinny thing is being bad upstairs!
    [squirrel girls look at each other]
    All four: [gleefully ♥ ♥ Field test! ♥ ♥
  • And in the same vein as the above, a couple strips later.
    Kat: Scarlet?! What are you wearing?
    Scarlet: Soopa soots.
    Kat: You built them just now?
    Amber: Nuh-uh. We've been working on them since the giant bug incident.
    (beat)
    Kat and Art: What giant bug incident?!
    Amber: Oooh...
• In this Shortpacked! strip, when Batman is left without an opportunity to complete his Stealth Hi/Bye, he gets two panels to come up with an alternate solution.
• Beaten to absolute death in Sketch Comedy.
• A fancomic called Sonic College did this with three.
• A few choice examples from Kevin & Kell:
  • In this comic we get a devious look between the titular couple when they realize they both masked their identities, and in the next panel they've called home and said they've checked into a motel. The implication is that March came late that year for them.
  • In this comic Kell is pulling out a laptop after sending Rudy and his Caliban hunting teammates out as Herd Thinners interns so she can track them with a GPS tag sewn into Rudy's hat.
  • In this comic we get an awkward silence between Edgar and Miranda after she had explained the overprotectiveness of her uncle/adoptive father, followed by Edgar with a choice question:
    Edgar: What species did you tell him I was?
    Miranda: Iguana.
• Lightning Made of Owls gota Beet Panel.
• Square Root of Minus Garfield does this here with reference to this page, and comment that Garfield might not use it enough.
  • The comic likes to experiment with these, the most notable one being the 27 beat panels in We Got the Beat(s).
  • Then there's Garfield Plus Beats in the Beat Panel, where a video game-related strip is edited to put three different Beats in the beat panel.
• Stickman and Cube does this often, usually when one of the characters does or says something incredibly bone-headed.
• Ruben Bolling's Tom The Dancing Bug mocked this trope mercilessly, with a strip that claimed that "the more silent reaction panels before the punchline, the funnier it is!", demonstrating by showing a strip with one beat panel, two beat panels and 100 beat panels (which was, in fact, hilarious).
• Lots of these in Vexxarr: when a Minionbot finally wraps its mind around some inclinations of the humanity. And again. And this.
• This VG Cats comic has six beat panels. The extended silence is probably a measure of Leo's dimwittedness.
  • He almost gets it about halfway through.
    • Also, the last panel seems to be a reference to the end of the seventies remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
• Used in this comic after the girl had a bit of a Fridge Logic.
• Humon uses beat panels to hilarious effect in all of her webcomics. Some of the funniest ones:
  • It's Complicated
  • Just Visiting (NSFW)
  • The Big Cover Up
• Appears a few times in Harkovast during the more light hearted moments, especially on this page where it actually happens twice in succession.
• Butterflies◊ in The Perry Bible Fellowship.
• Gunnerkrigg Court has unimpressed Annie. And two more with highly unimpressed Kat. A double beat panel punchline, and later triple beat panel, the scenes in question entirely justifying this much.
• Rusty and Co.:
  • In the re-acquaintance of The Princess and White Knight.
  • Roxy gets a magnificent one when she realizes she's standing right next to lit dynamite.
• The Extremely Post-Modern Adventures of Flint and Hinawa revolves around having two or even three beat panels between the setup and the usually oddball punchline. This is used to the extreme in Comic #6◊, where the beat just continues right to the end without a punchline.
• This strip of Wapsi Square uses beat panels in a rather creepy way. Pay attention to the light from the window.
  • The comic seems fond of the traditional use of this trope as well. It occurs most often when Monica suddenly realizes something, but other characters aren't immune.
• Miscellaneous Error uses a beat panel in an early comic.
• Fans! used beat panels(and other silent panels) in an innovative way in the arc "Crossover", which involves an attack on a crossword-fans convention. Each of the 18 pages has six square frames, with periodic beat panels, and each beat panel is framed in a thick black outline. As the final page displays, when all the panels are arranged in order, they form a crossword panel, with each beat panel as a black space, and the first letter in each of the other panels is used in the crossword solution.
• Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff does this all the time in a highly exaggerated manner.
  • Homestuck proper finally gets four beat panels (a lot for a comic that usually has one panel on each page) when Gamzee prototypes Equius into Dirk's sprite and causes a highly-anticipated awkward moment.
• This webcomic [3] consists entirely of beat panels in the first comic. But what do you expect from a comic called "The Mind-numbingly Boring Webcomic"? It appears to get better and actually funny in the next actual comic, but who knows how it will proceed.
• A Sex, Drugs, and June Cleaver strip uses two consecutive beat panels as the punchline.
• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has one while checking for an answer to a rhetorical question.
• In Savestate, an epic beat panel comes in the Halloween 2015 strip. Rick shows up so they can go to a Halloween party, and when he responds to a question about his costume with "Rick", Kade and Nicole look at each other with genuine concern. He explains he means Rick as in Rick and Morty.
  Nicole: Oh, okay. I thought we might have to drop you off at the psychiatric ward.
• O Human Star has plenty of these, but especially here.
• Shamus Young, writer of the webcomics DM of the Rings, was pretty proud of himself when he used three consecutive beat panels. It worked very well.
• Used every now and again in morphE to build an awkward moment. One moment in particular took up more than half the update for the gag.
• The first three panels in this Ladies In Waiting strip are all beat panels.
• Quite common in The Bird Feeder, and lampshaded in The Rant for #88, "Museum." Usually referred to there as the "silent penultimate panel."
• Random comic generators such as Pandyland often include beat panels, where the characters just stand there. With enough persistence it's possible to get a comic that's nothing but beat panels.
• The Best Gamepiece Photocomic:
  • After Martin is informed that a building has dedicated exits for tsunamis, earthquakes, and tornadoes, it takes a second for the Fridge Logic to kick in.
  • One also occurs in Strip 15, after Sven uses a Logic Bomb against a Knights and Knaves puzzle.
• This SMBC comic has only the first panel as a non-beat panel (including both the bonus panel and hover-text).
• Dumbing of Age:
  • Played for drama here when Joyce asks a brutal Armor-Piercing Question to her closeted transgender sister Jocelyne - "Is Mom a... good person?" The two panels of dead silence that follow make it very clear that Joyce isn't going to like Jocelyne's response.
  • Discussed here (also note the position of the beat panel in the strip):
    Dorothy: Have you even drawn any comics before?
    Joyce: It's easy! You just leave the second-to-last panel wordless and it's always funny.
    Dorothy: Seems like that'd get monotonous real fast.
    Joyce: Then move around the wordless panel, I dunno!

Web Original

• There's a blog devoted to watching for the silent penultimate panel.
• Another final panel beat example from this hacked Sonic the Hedgehog comic (NSFW).
• A vicious parody of beat panels, courtesy of Maddox. This in spite of how, as is noted elsewhere on this page, Garfield rarely ever uses beat panels.

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