Understanding comics

One idea that McCloud presented in Understanding Comics that I found very interesting was the concept of “the Gutter,” the space between two panels. He talks about how our brains are always seeking closure, so we interpret halftone dots to become a photograph, or 24 frames per second to become a single moving video. One simple example to visually represent what our mind does between panels is the Kanizsa Triangle.

  

We fill in the blanks.  We interpret separate panels as movement or a change of scenery or situation.  McCloud states there are six types of closure in comics and discusses how there is a pattern to the frequency and specific types of closure used in most any comic, no matter the genre. The most common type is action-to-action, where each frame is a distinct action, as opposed to moment-to-moment, which is 1 singular action broken up, much like film stills. What’s interesting is how even though there are a huge range of genres of comics form all part of the world, they all for the most part follow the same graph where action to action is the majority of panel types.

The second most used type of closure is subject-to-subject, which usually stays within the scene or at least the idea, but is more of key frames that we must piece together. The Arrival by Shaun Tan uses a fair amount of moment-to-moment to convey the main character’s emotion or action, but also uses a large amount of subject-to-subject which we have to deduce what the scene means as a whole.

The third part of the most common closure in comics is scene-to-scene. The is even more work left to the audience than subject-to-subject, where we must guess the entire content of a panel’s scene with only that singular container of information.

There are 2 more types that I haven’t even mentioned, but are not very commonly used, and when they are, most of the time, the comic is very experimental.