Week 2 - Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (3 points)

     McCloud’s final examination about the importance of ideas in comics and how they spark creativity is very romantic, but I would like to focus on the visual concept he calls the “Gutter”. McCloud defines the gutter as taking “…two separate images and forming them into a single idea,” (page 66) or in layman’s terms, the space between comics panels where nothing is happening. Except something is happening in the reader’s brain. If given the beginning and end of a story, many readers can guess what happens in the middle, and giving the reader that creative control can be very exciting. I believe some of the most interesting moments in comics happen in this imaginative space, because it lets the reader write and draw the comic, and whatever they come up with in their own heads will always be much more interesting to the individual person than whatever concrete story the author/artist creates.

    In movies, a cut portrays the same idea. If two characters kiss and after a quick cut they’re lying in bed with each other the next morning, the viewer’s brain can figure out what happened, and the fact that the middle moment was passed by so quickly makes that unseen scene much more interesting.

    This ties into a larger conversation that whatever we imagine will always be more interesting than reality. In fact, if people were so curious what was happening in those “gutter” moments that they demanded that the artist draw out those moments, the scene immediately become less interesting. Hundreds of questions will always be more interesting than one answer.