chapter 3 - "Blood in the Gutter"

In chapter 3- “Blood in the Gutter”, McCloud familiarizes the readers with what is known in the comic world as ‘gutters’à the gaps between panels in comics. These gutters may seem like simple dividers so that the reader can be lead to the next panel or scene, but actually, these gutters play a much larger role than that!

“Closure” is what goes on in our heads subconsciously while reading a comic strip. The Artist cannot depict every detail, so he/she will just depict what is important to telling the story. As panels differ, our mind puts them together- like a jig saw puzzle. McCloud explains to us how our minds work, how you may only receives half a face, but you subconsciously perceive the whole face in the picture.

Our minds can take a few lines, and see them as an object, symbol o perhaps a meaning. Between two panels, nothing is explained. It is up to the reader’s imagination to guess what happens in between to lead to the next panel. This can linked to the short animation we watched in Andrews lecture—about the Toads in a suburban Melbourne backyard. We knew for one that it was suburban areas—from the audio in the background. We heard cars (perhaps a main highway nearby), a dog barking (a pet dog in someone’s backyard), and the clicking of hundreds of cicadas or crickets. Yet none of this is told to us visually. This is purely ‘closure’ playing its part in our heads, where our minds assume rather than visually being told.

Closure is taking place in our minds when we are hardly aware of it. Take for instance the a few pages from the comic "Ramayan 3392 AD Reloaded" (below)... in the first picture, we see the two rivalries standing apart from each other. In the second panel they man is killing the beast! We automatically know that they would have had to be funning towards each other in order for the man to be in reach of the beast to stab him. This is closure!

Now McCloud also talks about the art and craft of comics. He lists the 6
- 1- Moment to moment
- 2- Action to action
- 3- Subject to subject
- 4- Scene to scene
- 5- Aspect to aspect
- 6- Non-sequitur

In the Panel above (Ramayan 3392 AD Reloaded), we see a 'subject to subject' shot, where in the first half panel, we are shown the persuers, and then suddenly in the second, we see the ones being persued.Closure is also happening here, where our minds are filling in the blank bar in between the two images. We can vaguly see the camera panning around to the to persued. I think that this techneque used by comic artists is very effective in the way that it involves the readers to think and in a way interact with the storyboard itself. Readers are sucked into these intense storylines, where they almost feel a part of.

All techniques used by comic artists help tell the story in different ways and styles.
I found it interesting how McCloud went to great lengths to showing us statistics and graphs of which of the 6 were used the most frequently in the comic world. It interested me how the American and western comics all focused with using techniques 2, 3 and 4, as the majority of them were based off action and drama. Where as Japanese comics use a completely different ray of techniques! They use a bit of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5! This way, the reader is told more within the comic visually, rather than having to use the imagination as much. This also explains why western comic books are much smaller than Japanese manga.