Groensteen (2.4) The System of Comics, ‘To the Research of the Gutter’, summary

by Corry Shores

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[The following is summary. Boldface and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so please excuse my distracting typos.]

Summary of

 

Thierry Groensteen

 

The System of Comics

 

Chapter 2:

Restrained Arthrology: The Sequence

 

2.4

To the Research of the Gutter

Brief summary:

The gutter is not an absence that the reader needs to fill-in by imagining what transpires temporally speaking or intervenes spatially speaking between comics panels. The gap of the gutter (or of the single line functioning like a gutter) is something absolute and self-sufficient in its emptiness. However, it serves as a flexible joint which may make logical narrative coherence connections with any of the other panels. And as the reader proceeds through the comics work and further considers what is being portrayed, those connections are continually under revision and modification.

 

Summary

 

[Groensteen begins by quoting from an article by Claude-Françoise Brunon on the comics gutter, it seems, which makes the point that “the essence of the story frequently passes ‘outside of the image ... between images’”. Groensteen then quotes from Benoît Peeters where the intericonic gutter contains at least as much meaning as in the images themselves. Groensteen also references McCloud’s chapter 3 on closure in Understanding Comics.]

“It requires less to make one see than to say, less to describe than to tell,” remarked Claude-Françoise Brunon.¹² And to highlight, following others, the essence of the story frequently passes “outside of the image . . . between images.” Certain authors even strive to produce work in a way so that the reader’s look, “deprived by principle episodes,” will be “carried out from one absence to the next,” even if “the text compensates for what the image refused to expose” on a frequent basis.

 

To conclude that meaning is produced by the intericonic gutter (the “entr’image”) at least as much as is produced by the images themselves, there is but one step, one that some people have been tempted to cross. Thus Benoît Peeters: “The true magic of comics operates between the images, the tension that binds them. . . . In Hergé these are memorable ‘gutters’ that we must analyze, these intervals between two panels lavished with accuracy and audacity.”¹³

(Groensteen 112)

[Endnotes 12–13 from p. 175 (quoting, except for curly brackets):

12 {Claude-Françoise Brunon.} “L’entr’images,” Europe, no. 720: La bande dessinée, Paris, Messidor, April 1989, pp. 37–46.

13 {Benoît Peeters.} Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 27. Scott McCloud also makes the ellipse (closure) a founding concept in his theory of comics, distinguishing six “types of linkage” between two panels. Cf. Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), chap. 3.

 

 

Groensteen then notes that a gutter as an empty space does not always appear. There could simply be a single line separating panels, as for example with Bretécher and Töpffer [see section 1.7.2]. For, “the semantic relations between the images is the same” regardless of whether there is an empty space or a line (Groensteen 112). Thus, we should not suppose there is some kind of a void between images when none are shown. [The idea seems to be that there is the semantic function of the break between images, and it does not matter whether or not it is constituted by a gap, visible or invisible, or not. It will have the same semantic function either way.] Hence “the gutter in and of itself (that is to say, an empty space) does not merit fetishization” (112).

 

Groensteen then addresses an objection. One might argue that the gutter is to be understood metaphorically as that between images which demands the reader fill-in unshown story content, and thus in that sense is a gap even if unseen.

Maybe, you will say to me, but the term “gutter” (blanc) lends itself metaphorically. We use it to designate “that-which-is-not-represented-but-which-the-reader-cannot-help-but-to-infer.” It is therefore a virtual, and take note that this virtual is not abandoned to the fantasy of each reader: it is a forced virtual, an | identifiable absence. The gutter is simply the symbolic site of this absence. More than a zone on the paper, it is the interior screen on which every reader projects the missing image (or images).

(Groensteen 112-113. Note: this is not Groensteen’s position)

 

[Groensteen then construes this missing narrative material in terms of Benoît Peeters’ notion of ghost panels (cases fantôme). In the footnotes he does not cite a source, but refers to an example Peeters gives. I cannot at the moment figure out Peeters’ argument and reasoning for it. If I had to guess, I would suppose that Peeters shows some panels (maybe two consecutive ones) and demonstrates that for the procession to work, the reader must in their imagination formulate a third additional panel intervening between them. Groensteen counter-argues that this only applies in very limited cases, and it cannot be said to express the functioning of the gutter in general. So in other words, perhaps, when the viewer sees for example the movement of an object that is shown in one relative location in a first frame and a more distant location in a second frame, we do not, Groensteen seems to be saying, imagine other panels in between the two showing the intermediary positions. Since I do not know what the argument really is here, I should not comment. But I think there is an interpretation, a phenomenological sort rather than a semiotic one, that is missing here. I do not think that the closure function requires that we explicitly imagine all the intermediary events or actions in between panels. I think they can be implicitly realized. In other words, in the case of motion for example, we can have the sense (not just the interpretation, but the perceptual sense) that the object has moved, even without imagining all the phases of that movement. Or in the case of events or characters’ actions, we can have the impression of those activities in their effects, as sort of compressed phenomenal impressional data. (I discussed this notion of phenomenal compression in bracketed commentary for the summary of chapter 3 of McCloud’s Understanding Comics.) So in other words, when we go from one panel to the next, packed into the next one are all the implicit phenomenal variations that are given indirectly by means of the noticeable differences between the two. At any rate, Groensteen makes a second point in this paragraph, and I may not summarize this one properly either. He says that these examples of ghost panels never involve only two panels. I am not sure if he means there are always at least three visible panels required for an additional invisible ghost panel, or if he means that there are two visible ones plus the additional ghost as the third. His point is that the threshold of narrative significance is the syntagmatic triad he described in section 2.3.]

I certainly do not believe that the comics reader has to mentally construct “ghost panels” (cases fantôme; the expression is from Peeters), except maybe in extremely rare examples identified by theorists to prove a point. These examples are a little too well-selected to permit the construction of general conclusions. By looking at it closely, we cannot help but be struck by an apparent paradox: these famous examples never relate to segments composed of only two panels — a necessary amplitude but sufficient to the exhibition of a gutter. A third panel is almost always implicated,¹⁴ and this confirms that it is indeed at the minimum a compound syntagm, or even a much longer sequence, that is at the major level of significance, the threshold where one can elaborate pertinent logical inferences.

(Groensteen 113)

[Endnote 14 on p. 175 (quoting):

14. Thus, in the famous example chosen by Peeters in Tintin in Tibet, that of Captain Haddock’s fall in the New Delhi airport, it is remarkable that Hergé interpolates a third panel representing Tintin (which is not directly concerned with the gag) at the location where there would most likely be a “ghost panel,” and that within this supplementary image the link between the two other panels of the syntagm would have been much less happy.]

 

[Groensteen’s next point is very interesting, but I am not sure it is clearly formulated in my mind yet. Groensteen seems to be expressing two important related ideas here. The first is that the gutter is not something that is filled in. It is a gap that never ceases to be such. It is an void whose emptiness is its own value and status of being, rather than a receptacle into which story content gets filled. Thus “an intermediate state between the two panels does not exist”. The second idea is that each successive panel at least at first nullifies all that come before them. Then, presumably, it can be placed in relation to them in sequence or whatever. I have the vague sense that he is saying that there is an ultimate value or authority placed on whatever panel is the present one being read. And that authority is stripped away and given to the next panel when we turn toward it.]

We would be mistaken to want to reduce the “silences” between two consecutive panels by assimilating the ellipse to a virtual image. On the contrary, this silence often speaks volumes. It has nothing to introduce, no gap to suture. It is in this sense that Henri Van Lier spoke of the “null blank” (blanc nul) in which the multiframe floats like a falling leaf. This blank, “the annulment of all continuity,”¹⁵ is the opposite of the “relay-gutter” (un blanc-relais). It is the Mallarmean blank of Coup de dés, the void of the music of Webern and that of quantum physics. Reading a comic, I am here, then I am there, and this jump from one panel to the next (an optical and mental leap) is the equivalent of an electron that changes orbit. In other words, an intermediate state between the two panels does not exist. The comics image is not a form that, subjected to a continual metamorphosis, would be modified by investing successive frames (between which it would be permissible to reconstitute the missing moments). It is necessary, in contrast, that the gutter (provisionally) cancels the already read panel in order to allow the next panel to exist in its own right, in terms of a complete and compact form.

(113)

[Endnote 15 on p.175 (quoting, except for curly brackets): {Henri Van Lier.} “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” op. cit. {in Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, ed. Thierry Groensteen (Colloque de Cerisy, Paris: Futuropolis-CNBDI, 1988)}, p. 8.]

 

[I may not be able to summarize the next paragraph properly. The sentence I do not know how to interpret is “Following this logical fallacy, all panels inevitably intervene apropos”. I did not understand what the logical fallacy is supposed to be. Is it logically fallacious to hypothesize a coherent narrative? Or is the logically fallacy the one of inferring that we fill the gaps? The paragraph minus that term I think can be summarized in the following way. The links between panels are not ones where there is a filling in of their gaps. Nonetheless, each one is placed into some meaningful relation with the others. He calls this ‘iconic solidarity’. What might also be suggested here is that every panel is linked to every other panel, in a more or less prominent or obvious way.]

Panels belonging to the same sequence are assuredly in debt to each other. On the semantic plane, this iconic solidarity, in which we have recognized the very foundation of the comics system, is programmed by the author at the breakdown stage, and, at the time of reception, postulated by the reader in the form of hypothesizing a coherent narrative. Following this logical fallacy, all panels inevitably intervene apropos. For the comics reader, the fact of presupposing that there is a meaning necessarily leads him to search for the way that the panel that he “reads” is linked to the others, and how it re-reads in light of others.

(113)

 

Comics, on account of the sequential panel format, are structured with “discontinuous enunciation” and “intermittent monstration”. [Perhaps enunciation and monstration refer to the “saying” and “showing” functions we have examined. What is important here of course is the strobe-like pattern in the way the material is given, that is, by discrete units with insufficient connections between them to make it a continuous structure or perhaps even to make it a continuous experience. Groensteen characterizes the gutter as being the place where logical conversions happen. Those conversions seem to be variations in the explanatory relations between the panels that change as new information is added. We saw how that works in the Alack Sinner example he gave in the prior section 2.3. My overall impression is that for Groensteen, the gutter is not to be seen as a “gap” but rather as a flexible “joint.” For, it is a connection that can vary, but it is not a hole that is filled in with additional material.]

Comics exist only as a satisfying narrative form under the condition that, despite the discontinuous enunciation and the intermittent monstration, the resultant story forms an uninterrupted and intelligible totality. The “gutter” between the two panels is therefore not the seat of a virtual image; it is the site of a semantic articulation, a logical conversion, that of a series of utterables (the panels) in a statement that is unique and coherent (the story). The Alack Sinner page taught us that this conversion is sometimes passed in stages. The first statement, issued from a dialogue between two or three juxtaposed panels — and naturally, forged under the control of the preceding ones — may be nothing but a provisory one that must undergo, under a stroke of unforeseeable retroactive determination, a correction in moving toward the adoption of a new, more inclusive statement.

(114)

 

[Groensteen now continues with this notion of the flexibility of the interpretation, and he elaborates it using quotation from Wolfgang Iser. At this point I think we should be careful. Iser has been used for explaining the filling-in of the gutter. For example, Hannah Miodrag writes in her Comics and Language: “This ‘filling in,’ especially as described by McCloud, is no more than the comics version of the ‘intentional sentences correlatives’ [sic] that Wolfgang Iser describes in prose fiction, which ‘disclose subtle connections’ between the ‘component parts’ of the text that together create ‘the world of the work’ (Iser 1980: 52)” (Miodrag 66). We should distinguish two sorts of “filling-in”. One is the sort that Groensteen is against with regard to what happens in the gutter, namely, filling in what transpired (or is located spatially) between what is shown in successive panels, by explicitly imagining it. The other sort, which Groensteen thinks is really how the gutter functions, is perhaps not even a filling-in, but rather a forming of logical narrative connections between parts, whether successive or not. So to make the difference clear, let me return to an example I used for section 2 of Iser’s “The Reading Process”. We are concerned especially with panels 2-4.

Were one to use the first type of filling-in, they would imagine the brush falling on the peeper’s head, even though it is not shown. Groensteen does not think that readers actually go through such a task. Rather, they would do the second sort of filling-in, which is really not a filling in but rather the creation of logical ties between panels. So Groensteen might say that upon seeing the peeper on the ground unconscious, fallen beneath the broken brush in the woman’s hand, we simply make a narrative connection between this and the panel just two prior to this one, and we note conceptually in our minds that the woman hit the man with the brush, all without picturing it in our minds. Groensteen’s point in this next paragraph seems to be that these logical narrative relations are according to Iser something that is flexible, on account of the horizonal structure of temporal consciousness. There is always an openness for new connections and for old connections to be retroactively revised. (For more discussion on the ideas from these quoted passages from Iser’s The Act of Reading, see the summary of section 5.2.1 of this book by Iser.)

Clearly, this progressive construction of meaning is not exclusive to comics. Rather, as Wolfgang Iser has notably demonstrated, it is analogous to the process that structures the reading of a literary text. The “wandering viewpoint” constitutes, he says, “the basic hermeneutic structure of reading.” In a sequence of sentences, new correlations frequently “lead not so much to the fulfillment of expectations as to their continual modification. . . . Each individual sentence correlate prefigures a particular horizon, but this is immediately transformed into the background for the next correlate and must therefore necessarily be modified. Since each sentence correlate aims at things to come, the prefigured horizon will offer a view which — however concrete it may be — must contain indeterminacies, and so arouse expectations as to the manner in which these are to be resolved.”¹⁶

(Groensteen 114)

[Endnote 16 from p.175 (quoting, except for curley brackets):

16. {Wolfgang Iser,} The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. from German by David Henry Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 111.]

 

[As I am not familiar with the concept of something being “polysyntactic,” I will not be able to summarize the last part of this section properly. So I will simply quote it for now.]

The comics image, whose meaning often remains open when it is presented as isolated (and without verbal anchorage), finds its truth in the sequence. Inversely, the gutter, insignificant in itself, is invested with an arthrologic function that can only be deciphered in light of the singular images that it separates and unites. Therefore, the intericonic gutter can be qualified as “polysyntactic,” following what Anne-Marie Christin has said about “pictorial emptiness” (that which separates the figures in the interior of an image, in the space of the picture). Anne- Marie Christin suggests that the function of narrative is that which pictorial emptiness assumes with the greatest difficulty:

[T]he clear and immediate designation of the roles of the represented figures does not raise the space that mutually isolates them from each other but the codes that are individually charged, codes of dress, gestural codes especially, as shown in genre paintings, for example those of Greuze. If the emptiness is necessary to constitute a storia between the painted figures, as preconceived by Alberti, it is because it is foremost a mark of intelligibility, the clue to a co-presence.¹⁷ |

The intericonic gutter also marks the semantic solidarity of contiguous panels above all, both working through the codes of narrative and sequential drawings. Between the polysemic images, the polysyntactic gutter is the site of a reciprocal determination, and it is in this dialectic interaction that meaning is constructed, not without the active participation of the reader.

(Groensteen 114-115)

[From endnote 17 on page 175 (quoting).

17. Anne-Marie Christin, L’Image écrite (Paris, Flammarion “Idées et Recherches,” 1995), p. 18.]

 

 

 

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated from French to English by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Originally published as Systém de la bande desinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.

 

 

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Hatfield (3) “The Art of Tensions”, ‘3. Single Image vs. Image-in-Sequence', summary

by Corry Shores

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[The following is summary. All boldface and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so I apologize for any distracting typos.]

Summary of

Charles Hatfield

“The Art of Tensions”

3. Single Image vs. Image-in-Sequence

Brief summary:

Comics begin as more or less continuous and coherent imagined sequences in the creators’ minds. This imagined sequence is then crafted by means of division and selection (and thus by omission) into a discrete series of less continuous fragments, constituted by the visual series of panels and called the ‘breakdown’. The reader, by means of closure, then reconstructs the story’s imagined sequence. This element of closure brings cohesion between panels and constructs an overall coherent imagined sequence. This process of construction can be relatively straightforward, especially when the creators make obvious and continuous transitions between panels within an overall coherent and consistent narrative. But the creators can also place challenges upon the reader’s ability to find closure by introducing discontinuities in the fabric of the presentation. For example, the images can insist on their own independence from one another on account of their individual traits that resist synthesis with the other panels, or this challenge to closure can come from an overall lack of obvious coherence in the overarching narrative sequence. This is the tension between single image vs. image-in-sequence. In cases where there is visual discontinuity, the dialogue can serve as a closure device, even when the dialogue itself is meandering or iconic.

Summary

Hatfield notes the importance of time in understanding comics and also in how comics narratives are structured. He defines breakdown as the process of producing and selecting images for a narrative sequence (which involves omitting certain ones).

Most definitions of comics stress the representation of time, that is, of temporal sequence, through multiple images in series. The process of dividing a narrative into such images — a process that necessarily entails omitting as well as including — can be called breakdown, a word derived from “breakdowns,” a term of art that refers to the rough drawings made in the process of planning out a comics story (Harvey, 14–15).

[Hatfield 135. Citing Harvey, R. C., The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).]

[We will need to think of the reverse process of the breakdown. So maybe the ideas is the following, but I am not sure. The breakdown would be the comics creator’s activity of taking the story as a whole (existing in her mind) and breaking it down into the fragments that make up the comics work. The reverse process is the reader starting with those fragments and building back up the story that started as whole in the creator’s mind. We discussed this when we examined chapter 3, on closure, in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, in light of Wolfgang’s Iser’s text, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” Hatfield then makes a terminological distinction between sequence and series. But I am not sure that I grasp it well. Perhaps these are conventional terms in this field, but they seem conceptually almost identical to me. As far as I can tell, the “imagined sequence” is something that occurs in the imagination of either the creator or the reader, but the “visual series” is the breakdown (the set of more or less ordered panels). I am really not sure, but perhaps we use the word ‘sequence’ in this way because it might suggest more of the relatively continuous unfolding of the story, while ‘series’ somehow implies a linear arrangement of discrete parts. But I am not certain.]

The reverse process [of a breakdown], that of reading through such images and inferring connections between them, has been dubbed (borrowing from gestalt psychology) “closure” by McCloud, in keeping with the reader-response emphasis of his Understanding Comics. In fact “breakdown” and “closure” are complementary terms, both describing the relationship between sequence and series: the author’s task is to evoke an imagined sequence by creating a visual series (a breakdown), whereas the reader’s task is to translate the given series into a narrative sequence by achieving closure. Again, the reader’s role is crucial, and requires the invocation of learned competencies; the relationships between pictures are a matter of convention, not inherent connectedness.

(Hatfield 135, bracketed insertion is mine)

Hatfield first says that this process of closure can happen in an unproblematic way. He cites a scene from Julie Doucet’s “The Artist” where after stripping off her close, she begins cutting apart her body. [This story can be seen here, at what might be a webpage for one of Hatfield’s classes.] [Hatfield’s point with this demonstration might be that we use our normal pattern of closure at the beginning, where we imagine the motions that transpire between panels, but then we are committed to that pattern when we arrive at the end when she begins doing things we might not want to imagine. Or perhaps he is not talking about the gutter closures individually but rather about the ongoing construction of a whole story that we commit to at the beginning and must finish at the end, even if we do not like the way the story turns.]

[So this case of Doucet’s “The Artist” seems to be one where the closure operation is automatic and fluent.] But there are cases where closure can “require more active effort on the part of the reader” (135). Hatfield illustrates with a couple pages in Jason Lutes Jar of Fools, and he notes a few ways that the reader needs to expend more effort to achieve closure in this panel series. The first thing he notes is that it does not begin with an establishing shot. So spatially speaking, there is no initial sort of holistic view of the location. That comes only after four panels.

Hatfield describes this scene in the following way: “Lutes frames the entire day from Esther’s point of view, sticking close to the minutiae of her clockwork routine. The repeated use of close-ups throughout the sequence reinforces the repetitive yet discontinuous nature of her work” (135). [One point here Hatfield might be making is that closure may be more difficult to accomplish since the nature of her work is discontinuous, but I am not sure.] We see the repetitiveness in Ester’s mechanical repetition of the question, “Can I help you?” (135). Hatfield then notes a moment that presents a challenge for the reader to attain closure. When a customer offends Ester, we see her punching the customer in the face. At first, our process of closure might regard this as reality. But in the next panels we see that nothing has happened in reality, so we know retroactively that this was a dream. We might also notice that the panel border became rounded, which also suggests a switch to a different mode of reality. [Hatfield writes, “That she imagines this, but does not do it, is something the reader must figure out for herself: Lutes suggests this both by the unvarying rhythm of the sequence and by the subtle variation in panel bordering around the imagined punch (the latter a technique used previously by Lutes to set off dreams and memories — by this point the reader presumably knows the code).” But I was confused how the unvarying rhythm of the sequence would suggest there was a shift in modes of reality. Would not an invariance in the rhythm suggest a maintenance in the mode of reality? His point might be that the invariance tells us real time has been pacing as normal, while the punch action was a daydream superimposed on that steady flow of real time.]  So here is another case where achieving closure is not absolutely automatic, as it required the reader to do some revision: “Yet the moment comes as a shock nonetheless, due in part to the repeated use of a single, unvarying image — Esther’s taciturn face — to pace the sequence. We see her land a blow, yet nothing about her or around her changes to match this unexpected outburst. The reader must negotiate the larger context of Lutes’s narrative to make this key distinction” (136).

Hatfield then notes that this pattern continues to the next page, and he writes, “To follow this sequence, the reader must be mindful of Lutes’s previously established habits as a storyteller — his approach to panel bordering, his interpolations of dream and fantasy into mundane reality, and so on — and take an active part in constructing a flow of events from discontinuous images” (137).

Hatfield then gives examples where “achieving closure can be quite difficult, as when images seem radically disjointed and verbal cues are scant.” The first example is from Spiegelman’s “drawn over two weeks while on the phone” [which can be seen again at Hatfield’s class site here.] [Hatfield’s point here seems to be that were it not for certain genre conventions or design elements that carry over from panel to panel, we would perhaps be unable to see this as a single comic. And in fact, the real continuity is simply the author’s playful irregularity.]

At times achieving closure can be quite difficult, as when images seem radically disjointed and verbal cues are scant. For example, Art Spiegelman’s wordless “drawn over two weeks while on the phone” (Raw 1) presents a series of disconnected panels with recurrent character types and situations but no narrative per se. Generic conventions — nods to film noir, for instance — are repeatedly invoked but without a linear rationale; motific repetition suggests at best a vague connection between otherwise disjunct panels. Certain characters and symbols are repeated: geometric symbols, for instance, which serve as pictographic dialogue, as decorative effects, and, in a droll reversal, even as characters. But the sought-for unity of the piece, finally, rests on the reader’s recognition of the author’s formal playfulness rather than on any coherent narrative. It takes much knowledge and careful attention to read Spiegelman’s series as a sequence.

(137)

Hatfield’s next point is that McCloud’s Understanding Comics may be missing one important closure device, namely the interaction between word and image. [Perhaps here he is referring to the shapes in the speech bubbles of Spiegelman’s “drawn over two weeks while on the phone” (again, viewable here). Even though we cannot discern any textual meaning to them, their common visual appearance lends some sense of continuity to the sequence.]

The tension between single image and image-in-series is bound up with other formal issues, and therefore hard to codify. McCloud’s Understanding Comics remains the strongest theoretical treatment (in English, that is) of comics sequencing; yet McCloud, perhaps because he does not consider visual/verbal interplay crucial to the form, neglects just | how much the interaction of image and word can inform, indeed enable, the reading of sequences. Verbal cues do help to bridge the gaps within a sequence, as seen in common transitional captions such as “Later” or “Meanwhile” (devices that have fallen from favor as readers become more versed in reading comics, just as title cards, fades, irises, and other such transitional devices fell from favor in cinema). In fact verbal continuity can impose structure on even the most radically disjointed series. Witness, for instance, Spiegelman’s oft-reprinted “Ace Hole, Midget Detective,” in which the hero’s nonstop narration (a spoof of hard-boiled fiction) serves to structure an otherwise nonlinear barrage of non sequiturs, visual gags, and stylistic swipes.

(137-138)

 

 

 

Hatfield notes that one way closure is achieved is through the interplay of successive images [as with Doucet’s “The Artist” and perhaps the Jar of Fools sequence. Here, the continuity or rhythm of the panels facilitates the closure process.] Also, closure can be attained through the “interplay of different codes of signification: the verbal as well as the visual” (138) [as we saw with the Spiegelman examples. Here we had verbal codes of signification, in the balloons, which had either a visual or a genre sort of consistency, and the visual codes of signification, which may not have been obviously related to the dialogue but which had their own sort of associative logic.] [Now, recall McCloud’s categories of transition from chapter 3 of Understanding Comics, like moment-to-moment, action-to-action, and so on. Here McCloud does not include something like what Hatfield has in mind. I am not sure how to name it, but maybe something like, “dialogue-to-dialogue”.] But there is a certain sort of transition that does not fit within McCloud’s six types.

Verbal/visual interplay often muddies the pristine categories of transition that McCloud tries to establish in Understanding Comics (moment to moment, action to action, scene to scene, and so on). Words can smooth over transitions and unobtrusively establish a dramatic continuity that belies the discontinuity of the images.

(138)

[I think Hatfield’s point here with regard to McCloud’s transition types is that dialogue can serve as the coherence device in any of the six types. And thus we cannot clearly distinguish them. But I am not sure that this criticism lands so well, or perhaps I misunderstand it. I do not think that McCloud’s distinctions disallow for dialogue to assist the closure. Granted, the emphasis in each type is on the visual contents of the panel, almost as if dialogue is irrelevant to the classification. But perhaps the dialogue really is irrelevant to the classifications. The types are not classified on the basis of the closure mechanism, but rather on the type of change in each case. In other words, whether or not there is dialogue that bridges the panels should not matter in his classification system. Hatfield’s point might still be that for example the non-sequitur type, where there is no visual coherence, is not really a non-sequitur, when for example the dialogue bridges the visual incongruities. However, there is no category in McCloud’s system for when panel transitions are visually discontinuous but textually continuous. And thus, as Hatfield observes, McCloud misses the importance of the interplay between text and image in this classification system.]

 

To show how “Words can smooth over transitions and unobtrusively establish a dramatic continuity that belies the discontinuity of the images,” Hatfield will contrast Harvey Pekar’s (and Robert Crumb’s) “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” and “Hypothetical Quandary”. [I might be mistaken, but Hatfield’s procedure seems to be the following. First he shows a case where visually the closure is achieved quite easily, because the panels are all quite similar. This also has the effect of allowing us to focus on the text. Then Hatfield shows an example where the monologue is similarly continuous, but the image sequence lacks an overall sense of a unifying element to give it closure (although I would note that there seems to be a temporal continuity implied in the visual sequence that gives it its own coherence). So now we recall the first two kinds of tension. In section 2 we discussed code vs. code tension. Here we noted that pictorial codes and textual codes can have a tense interplay of some sort. This is especially obvious when pictures or icons are used in dialogue bubbles. Then in this section we have discussed single image vs. image-in-series tension. I am not sure I follow what that tension is, but I think it might be the tension between the individuality and conceptual independence of each panel with the fact that it inevitably becomes a participating unit in a larger sequential structure. Now Hatfield says that there is another tension between these two layers of tension. I suppose the idea is that there is a tension between image and image-in-series resulting from the discontinuity of the panels, and there is also somehow a tension between codes, but I do not know what that is. It might be the relative discontinuity of Pekar’s discourse, which explores “all the twists and turns of Harvey’s thinking”. So now there is a tension between these tensions. (I am not sure at this point why we need the concept of tension. I guess we use it because it both implies a bond while also suggesting a non-reducibility of the bonded things, as they act in resistance to one another. But I am not sure why we are not simply using the term “relation”. The “tense” element only seems to come to light in the exceptional cases that Hatfield gives rather than being obvious in most cases. I think the idea is that we see it in these exception cases where it is obvious, and then we can better detect it in the normal cases, where it is less apparent but still an important factor.)]

Propelled as much by Pekar’s text as by the subtle authority of Crumb’s pictures, “Hypothetical Quandary” moves Harvey (and the reader) over a great distance, telescoping his Sunday morning expedition into three pages. Like the above example from Lutes’s Jar of Fools, this story relies on words as well as common visual cues for its pacing. Driving, walking, buying bread, walking again — all of these happen while Harvey’s internal dialogue carries on without interruption, until the last two panels find him savoring the bread’s fresh smell, his quandary forgotten. The continuity of the verbal text disguises the discontinuity of the visual: Pekar’s ongoing words, exploring all the twists and turns of Harvey’s thinking, elide the gaps in the visual sequence, making this stylized evocation of his world seem naturalistic and unforced. Whereas “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” weds the author’s text to deliberately repetitive breakdowns and a single, static composition, “Hypothetical Quandary” uses text to carry the reader from one locale to the next without ever losing continuity of thought. These contrasting examples point up the possibility that breakdown may depend on mixing the verbal and the visual. Thus the two tensions named so far, code vs. code and single image vs. image-in-series, interact to create a yet more complex tension, soliciting the reader’s active efforts at resolution.

(139)

From:

Hatfield, Charles. “The Art of Tensions.” In A Comics Studies Reader, pp.132–148. Edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi,  2009.

Image sources:

Lutes, Jason. Jar of Fools.  ©1997 Jason Lutes. Montreal: Black Eye Books [Originally published 1994 Penny Dreadful Press.]

Pekar, Harvey. “The Harvey Pekar Name Story.” In American Splendor #2. ©1977 Harvey Pekar.

Pekar, Harvey. “Hypothetical Quandary” In American Splendor #9. ©1984 Harvey Pekar.

 

Spiegelman, Art. “Ace Hole: Midget Detective.” ©1974 Art Spiegelman. In Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@$*! ©2008 Art Spiegelman. Penguin.

Hatfield (1) “The Art of Tensions”, ‘1. Code vs. Code’, summary

 

by Corry Shores

 

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[The following is summary. All boldface and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so I apologize for any distracting typos.]

 

 

 

Summary of

 

Charles Hatfield

 

“The Art of Tensions”

 

1. Code vs. Code

 

 

 

Brief summary:

Comics contain both image and text. It is hard to distinguish the one from the other. For, whenever we think we may have designated some element of a comics work as a word, we find it can also function as an image, especially to the degree that is written pictorially or at least serves some pictorial function or has some sensory effect. And likewise, any instance of an image will involve some system or operation of reference whenever that image is perceived in a thoughtful way. For this reason, we cannot follow other comics scholars who deem there to be an absolute distinction between word and image, and we thus cannot go the extra step and characterize pictures by the immediacy by which they communicate information and text by the need for that information to be mediated through learned, culturally-conditioned conventions. But instead of this circumstance leading us either to try to dissolve the distinction or to define image and text on the basis of how elements function (and thus to say for example that one same element is text insofar as it functions referentially and an image insofar as it functions sensory-affectively) we will instead in a deconstructive sort of way make use of the tension between the distinguished terms in a manner that both maintains the distinction while as well seeing how the distinguished concepts play off of one another in ways that call into question the basis for that very same distinction that enables the interplay.

 

 

 

Summary

 

When comics are defined, often there is some appeal to the “co-presence and interplay of image and written text” (133). Hatfield says that for some critics the elements of word and image are opposites and their interaction is a clash of sorts, with “the image’s transparency versus the written text’s complexity” (133). Hatfield cites Scott McCloud as someone who insists not only on the difference of these two elements, but also on the greater importance of images – which he understands as “received information” that is obtained passively by the reader – over words, whose meanings “must be perceived” in a more active way through “committed reading” (Hatfield 133, citing McCloud, Understanding Comics, 49) [McCloud writes: “Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous. [...] Writing is perceived information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols of language.” It seems Hatfield will take issue with how this distinction is made here. The basis of Hatfield’s argumentation seems to be that in most cases when we see an image, we obtain the information by means of some mediation through cultural values and through habits of interpretation and so on. Perhaps even it can be said that the ways our minds organize our raw sense perceptions is in certain ways culturally conditioned. His argument against McCloud’s view of text seems to be based on text always taking some stylized visual form or another, often times with that stylization having pictorial qualities and functions. If I might suggest an example, simply italicizing a word gives it a different sound in one’s mind while being read, and certainly much more drastic pictorial variations can be found in comics to even greater sensory effect.]  Hatfield then assesses, “By this argument, comics depend on a dialectic between what is easily understood and what is less easily understood; pictures are open, easy, and solicitous, while words are coded, abstract, and remote” (133).

 

Hatfield view is not the same as this. He notes that “in comics word and image approach each other;” for, “words can be visually inflected, reading as pictures, while pictures can become as abstract and symbolic as words. In brief, the written text can function like images, and images like written text” (133). [At this point I wonder what the basis of the distinction between text and image is. One way to make the distinction is by function. Under this view, insofar as something is functioning as text, it is text, and insofar as it is functioning as image, it is image. With this in mind, one same thing performing both functions could be called by both names. Hatfield’s distinction does not seem to be based on function, since one thing can perform the other’s function. In other words, my confusion comes from the fact that Hatfield first designates something as a word, then says it can function as an image. What I would like to now is on what basis was it originally classified as a word, if we are saying that it is functioning like an image? Perhaps he is saying that certain things in comics can have a primary function but a secondary one as well, and in that way for example text can function as pictures. So for instance, if a sound word like “zap” is drawn to make it appear like electricity, then it primarily functions as a word for the sound that is being made, and secondarily it functions as a picture to evoke in our imagination physical sorts of features of the sound (like harsh, rough buzzing ‘edges’ to the noise) or visual correlates to the sound, like sparks of light flashing erratically in concord with pops or snaps in the sound. Phenomenologically speaking, for me text and image experiences never really blend, although they can coincide or interchange. So were I to see for example the image-like “zap” word, the part of my consciousness that would decode it as being a linguistic signifier is different than the part of my consciousness that would picture the scene and its sounds as having certain tangible features to it. I notice this experiential division sometimes when I see contemporary paintings with a poetic sort of text painted into them. Were it just imagery, I would experience it in a singular sort of way. But with the text in it, I switch between modes of reception, and I often find the experience a bit confusing.] Hatfield says that comics “collapse the word/image dichotomy,” because written text can be made visually “quite elaborate in appearance, forcing recognition of pictorial and material qualities that can be freighted with meaning,” while images on the other hand “can be simplified and codified to function as a language” (133). Hatfield says that this “renders McCloud’s larger argument incoherent, as it belies his earlier distinction between perceived and received information” (133). [I am not sure if I follow, but I think Hatfield is saying that if we take it to be true that there is no substantial distinction between word and image, as one can take the other’s function, then McCloud’s point about the experience of one involving receiving information and the other involving perceiving information no longer holds. For, each case could involve both receiving or perceiving information. But I am assuming Hatfield is not saying that McCloud’s argument itself is incoherent. I do not think McCloud contradicts himself. As far as I can tell so far, McCloud’s view is only incoherent with other views that oppose his. It would be incoherent in itself if McCloud on the one hand said there was a fundamental and unbridgeable difference between word and text and on the other hand said that this difference dissolves in many cases. I think perhaps the criticism here is that McCloud is offering a theory to explain the way certain elements in comics work, but further examination shows his theoretical assumptions to contradict many other obvious findings. The problem we might raise with this criticism is that we have not considered how McCloud might defend his position in the face of this evidence that he did not consider in his book. Would he concede the point? Would he maintain the distinction but with reservations? Would he find fault with these other findings?  Here is McCloud’s graphic for the distinction:

On the one hand, he does have a dotted line clearly separating image from text. However, the instances are placed along a continuum of variation. And he writes “received” and “perceived” not at the centers of each division, but rather at the poles. That fact combined with the way the instances seem to vary more or less continuously from one pole to the other suggests that as we get to the middle, either there is a mix of receptivity and perceptivity, with both in full operation but simultaneous, or there is an equal diminishment of both factors. In other words, it is not so obvious to me that McCloud is making an absolute distinction. But I personally would not construct the spectrum the way McCloud does, because I would be more inclined to place sensory-affectivity at the left pole and conceptualization at the right.] Hatfield’s next point seems to be that there is compelling reason to think that there is not this division between word and text. One thing he cites is Perry Nodelman’s point that [if I understand correctly] the only way we could “read” the pictures in picture books is if we have some linguistic sort of cultural knowledge that is requisite to decipher the images. [Let me quote this, as I probably misinterpreted: “The distinction does not hold in any case, for, as Perry Nodelman points out with regard to picture books, “All visual images, even the most apparently representational ones, . . . require a knowledge of learned competencies and cultural assumptions before they can be rightly understood” (Hatfield 133, citing p.17 of Nodelman, Perry, Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). Hatfield’s next point seems to be giving reason to think that images are really signs. So perhaps this sentence we just quoted was making the point that signs are really images. But I am not sure really, because I have not had a chance to read this source yet.] And images, according to W.J.T Mitchell, are signs that pretend not to be signs, even though they can never stop being such, because they are bound up with habit and convention just as text are (133). [So the idea here seems to be that whatever is bound up with habit and convention would have to be a sign, which makes sense, as it would be a mediated significance rather than an immediate sort that McCloud seems to think images have. Now, since there are no experiences of images that give their sense immediately in this way, but rather they require the mediation of habit and convention, images must also be understood as signs. Again, I am still a little confused about the criteria for the terminology. If we say that an image is also a sign, because the image has the function of a sign, that on what basis do we say it was an image in the first place? I wonder if Hatfield is saying that there is no need for the terminological distinction between word and sign. Whatever we call a word we can also call as sign, and vice versa, or we could find a word to mean both. So one possibility I think is to say we have visual data that no matter what will serve to a lesser or greater degree both a significatory and a sensory-affective function. But, we can arbitrarily think of it as a word when we are concerned with its signification or we can just as arbitrarily think of it as an image when we are concerned with sensory-affectivity. Another possibility could be to say that there is no difference between these functions. Whenever our senses are affected in a purely sensory way, they are in one way or another serving as signifiers, and likewise, whenever we take something to stand referentially for something else, we are performing a sensory sort of operation, perhaps like how David Hume understood concepts as habits of associating retained sensory impressions.] In other words, as Hatfield summarizes, “Pictures are not simply to be received; they must be decoded” (133).

 

[In the next paragraph I think it begins to become more evident what mode of reasoning Hatfield is using for this distinction. I think it might be a sort of deconstructive approach in some sense. On the one hand, he needs the distinction (between word and text in comics) in order for there to be a play of opposition between them (but I am not yet sure why that play is needed). On the other hand, the nature of that play, which challenges boundaries, affirms ambiguities and ambivalences, inverts hierarchies, and so on, calls into question the rigidity and integrity of the distinction. In other words, he needs there to be “tension” for the play to operate, so the distinction must hold in some sense. However, the result of this play presents a challenge to the very basis of the distinction that is supposedly responsible for that tension in the first place. Logically speaking this seems to be some sort of a notion of undecidability. Whether some given in a comics work is an image or a text is something undecidable. It is not strictly both or neither, nor is it strictly one or the other. Whatever it is cannot for some reason be decided. I am not sure why, but perhaps it is because sometimes it functions exclusively one way, other times exclusively another, and any effort to pin it down at one pole of functioning will only make it squirm off to the opposite pole, in a sense. Or perhaps it functions exclusively one way but thereby somehow as well must function exclusively the other way, in some paradoxical operation that I am unable to conceive. My own personal view, which I mentioned before, is that the same given can have either function depending phenomenologically on how they operate in our consciousness, and when both operations are somehow at work at the same time, there would have to be a divided but simultaneous consciousness of both operations, or perhaps a rapid interchange between them. The idea of our consciousness having one operation that accomplishes two very different tasks, namely, on the one hand taking something to stand for another thing while on the other hand doing nothing more than simply registering the sensory features of something, is hard for me to conceive or to find in my own experiences. How can one operation of consciousness accomplish both tasks? I can only think for example of Deleuze’s notion of pre-linguistic signalytic material, which is somehow both purely sensory and yet the basis on which significance is built. In other words, we can have sensory-affective experiences that are not linguistic in any way, but we sense differences that make a difference and thus we have a prelinguistic sort of sign or bare significance. But my phenomenological approach is not relevant here. So let us stick with Hatfield’s text:]

Still, responding to comics often depends on recognizing word and image as two “different” types of sign, whose implications can be played against each other — to gloss, to illustrate, to contradict or complicate or ironize the other. While the word/image dichotomy may be false or oversimple, learned assumptions about these different codes — written and pictorial — still exert a strong centripetal pull on the reading experience. We continue to distinguish between the function of words and the function of images, despite the fact that comics continually work to destabilize this very distinction. This tension between codes is fundamental to the art form.

(Hatfield 133)

 

 

 

From:

Hatfield, Charles. “The Art of Tensions.” In A Comics Studies Reader, pp.132–148. Edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi,  2009.

 

Or if otherwise noted:

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.

 

.

McCloud (ch.3) Understanding Comics, ch.3 “Blood in the Gutter”

 

by Corry Shores

 

[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]

 

[[Central Entry Director]

[Literature, Drama, and Poetry, Entry Directory]

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[The following is summary. Bracketed commentary and boldface (unless noted otherwise) is my own. I apologize in advance for any distracting typos you might encounter. I have not finished proofreading.]

 

 

 

Summary of

 

Scott McCloud

 

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

 

 

Chapter 3: Blood in the Gutter

 

 

Brief summary:

Comics is an art form and medium that functions largely by means of the Gestalt process of closure. The panels give the reader fragments of the story world, with the vast majority of that world being left out of the frame of each panel and also with much of the development that transpires in the story being excluded between the  panels. Closure is operation that the reader uses to imaginatively fill in the gaps that the comics creator leaves out. There are six main types of panel transitions that make use of closure: {1} moment-to-moment, which gives a continuous cinematic decomposition of an unbroken sequence of motion, {2} action-to-action, which presents differing states of affairs as points of accomplishment of activities or events, {3} subject-to-subject, which moves from one character or thing to another, often following their active contribution to events or situations, {4} scene-to-scene, which makes significant jumps in time and/or location, {5} aspect-to-aspect, which shows the same situation from varying spatial perspectives, and {6} non-sequitur, where there is no logically coherent connection at all. However, on account of the force of closure, no matter how disjointed a series of panels are, our minds will still find some way to bring unity to them. Conventional Western comics give a priority primarily to action-to-action transitions and to a relatively lesser degree to subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene. This functions to progress a story, understood as a series of events, as efficiently as possible. Eastern comics place much more emphasis on moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions. This has the effect of drawing out the movement of the story and setting moods. There is an inferential element to how closure works, and so depending on which panels in a series are excluded, the reader will draw different conclusions about what is transpiring and what the significance is of the events. There is also a synaesthetic sort of closure at work where, by the power of closure generally speaking and as well as a result of the sensory-unlimited nature of the gutters, all other modes of sensation are activated when reading comics. The nature of the pictures can affect closure activities, because more iconic (that is, less detailed cartoony sorts of) images facilitate closure while photorealistic images hinder it. This special role of closure in comics makes it a unique art form, as the others do not involve the same sort and/or degree of audience creative participation by means of closure. And also, closure brings together into a phenomenal collaboration the creator and reader, and it causes the invisible component (what is left out of the imagery) with the visible parts (what is included visually) to enter into a productive bond and interaction. For, closure is what brings the “invisible art” to light.

 

 

 

 

Summary

 

McCloud notes that as a child, he sometimes daydreamed “that the whole world was just a show put on for my benefit, that unless I was present to see things, they just - - ceased to exist” (60). But now, even as an adult, McCloud recognizes that he just has to believe many things “exist outside of what my five senses report to me” (61). He explains, “All of us perceive the world as a whole through the experience of our senses. Yet our senses can only reveal a world that is fragmented and incomplete” (62). He makes this point very effectively with a panel showing how we only see relatively very small fragments of the surface of the earth, but we regard our world as one whole unified thing.

 

Yet, as children, before we develop this cognitive capacity, we can be surprised when things reappear in our vision, as when playing peek-a-boo.

 

McCloud explains this phenomenon with the Gestalt notion of closure, which he defines as the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). It is a feature of our consciousness that we use in everyday life so to properly recognize objects that only show themselves partly or indirectly. It is used also in story-telling to create suspense. It often operates automatically as a normal feature of our consciousness. We even use it to recognize and relate to other people. And in fact, “In an incomplete world, we must depend on closure for our very survival” (63).

 

Closure operations take many forms. Sometimes we just need to see a shape or outline in order to fill in the fuller form it calls to mind. For example, just a circle with two dots and a line inside it can be recognized by most people as a face, even though faces are full of much more distinguishing detail.

 

If we look very closely at newspaper photographs, for example, we see it is made of fragments, like dots, yet we perceive it as an internally continuous whole (64).

 

McCloud also notes how by means of the persistence of vision our minds in this Gestalt manner perceive continuous motion rather than a rapid series of still photographs (65). [For a discussion of the phi phenomenon, see this entry on Barry Dainton’s “The Experience of Time and Change”.] A similar sort of mental process is involved when we watch cathode ray tube television sets, since it does not even flash a full image but only a rapidly moving point of light scanning over the surface of the screen.

 

McCloud thinks that comics is a medium that is notable for its use of closure, particularly on account of the way the readers/viewers collaborate with the authors/artists to create the changes and motions of the story.

 

McCloud then describes the role of closure in the operation of the gutter, which is the gap between panels: “See that space between the panels? That’s what comics aficionados have named ‘the gutter.’ And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are the very heart of comics!” (66). He continues, “Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (66). [This reminds me of Eisenstein’s theory of montage editing where the combination of two different images edited in direct sequence form a third idea in the viewer’s mind.] McCloud shows a very useful example. First we see what seems to be an ax murderer about to chop to death some victim, with action lines in the background giving us the impression that it is right at the beginning of the ax’s swing. There are two other elements that presage the forthcoming event. There is the look of determination in the ax murder’s face and the look of utter fright in the victim’s face, which suggests the characters’ bodies realize that what will almost certainly come next is a gruesome murder. And also, the dialogue announces and suggests the murder. The murderer says, “NOW YOU DIE!!” and the victim responds, apparently in recognizing what is to come, “NO! NO!” (66). The subsequent “EEYAA” also suggests that the victim is screaming in pain from the ax cutting him to death.

McCloud notes that “Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something must be there!” McCloud then shows a series of stills in a sequence of continuous motion to make that point that “Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. [...] But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (67).

 

McCloud will then draw the inference that comics itself is closure. We first make an analogy. In the way that visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is the grammar. [Perhaps he means that the individual components of comics, which function like words, are the visual iconic images. But these are combined like how syntax combines words into meaningful sentential units. Since closure is the mechanism that brings the iconic elements together, it is like the syntactical element of comics story-telling and is thus the medium’s ‘grammar’.] The next step of the inference is to appeal to the definition we are using of comics, which defines it on the basis of the arrangement of its elements. Since it is arranged by closure, that means it is defined by closure. [And whatever defines something is what it is.] Therefore, “in a very real sense, comics is closure” (67 boldface his).

 

McCloud then makes an important point in distinguishing the operation of closure in comics from that of other electronic media:

The closure of electronic media is continuous, largely involuntary and virtually imperceptible. But closure in comics is far from continuous and anything but involuntary! Every act committed to paper by the comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as the reader. I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style. All of you participated in the murder. All of you held the axe and chose your spot.

(68)

 

[I think we should elaborate on these points further. The first observation I would like to make is on the ways that McCloud’s ideas correspond to what we learned from Wolfgang Iser’s “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” Generally speaking, it could be said that McCloud in this section is taking a phenomenological or reader-response sort of approach to the gutter-structure in comics. What makes the gutter what it is, is not what it actually is, which is a space (or just the line of a panel outline, as Groensteen notes in section 1.7.2 of The System of Comics). Rather, the gutter from this view is constituted by the contents of the reader’s consciousness, who creatively constructs the missing story elements in their imagination. This is the reader’s participation (as in the murder) that McCloud is emphasizing. The other point of elaboration is on the difference between the comics medium and other electronic media like film and television. In these cases, he referred to the passive illusory operation of forming continuous imagery in our perception on the basis of fragments in the medium’s mode of presentation of its imagery. McCloud, also by drawing a suspense scene, may have been indirectly referring to film and video editing, where discontinuities of time and space are much more drastic than mere slight variations of frames in a continuous cinematographic sequence. The question then is, to what degree and in what way is the experience of the comics gutter different from the film cut? At first sight, there seems to be little or no difference of any substantial kind, as they function in the same way. Even edits like in the ax-murder comics scene is common in film, where gruesome actions are shown right up to the really disturbing part, when there is a cut away and perhaps you hear the sounds of the actions without seeing them. (Or perhaps there is some sort of match cutting, like going from the fall of an ax in an ax murder to a close up of a carrot getting chopped on a cutting board, after an abrupt scene change.) I think that so far in our examination, we phenomenologically speaking do not have a substantial enough of a difference to use gap-closure as a means to distinguish comics from film. However, if we do pay close phenomenological attention to our modes of experience when watching a film with these sorts of cuts involving Gestalt closures and comics, there is a notable difference. Before I note my own observation, let us look first at McCloud’s. He says that the difference is that the comics gap-closing is less involuntary than in these other media. He is contrasting here the illusion of motion with the comics gutter, rather than a film cut with a comics cut. But perhaps we can still use his justification were we to consider the difference between an ax murder film scene that has a cut identical to the one he depicted with comics frames and the comics ax murder sequence he drew. In a film, the machinery of the projector or playback mechanism puts us into a passive state of involuntary perceptual reception where what we come to experience is given without our control. The images appear in the way and at the pace that the director/editor wants them to appear. The comics creator has the same range of options for the cuts, but the difference is that the reader of comics has more control over how those images will be received. When watching a film, our bodies are like marionettes that the director controls. In the comics experience, we are still affected directly by the imagery, but we are invited to go at our own pace and have some sense of feeling of control. In other words, the primary difference that I notice in the comics experience with regard to cut transitions is the degree of activity and feeling of control we have in how we fill in the gaps. This I think corresponds to McCloud’s point that the reader is an “equal partner” in the crime, rather than a helpless witness. There is one more distinction between film and comics closure that I would like to propose. First note some exceptional and important cases in film that will call into question the accuracy of my observation, namely, Soviet montage editing and chaos cinema, and also Chris Marker’s La Jetée. In La Jetée, for example, there story is told near-exclusively with a sequence of still images. This deserves much more analysis, which we will have to do another time. Phenomenologically speaking, it could potentially constitute a “comics experience”. The other examples of hard, discontinuous editing of motion sequences (as in Soviet montage and chaos cinema) might also function in the way that I think is more particular to comics. But let us see. According to my examination of my own comics experience, I do not experience film and comics editing identically. For me, reading a comics work is like proceeding through a series of flashes, with each one packed with implicit data that unpacks suddenly in my imagination. In Warren Ellis’ and Darick Robertson’s “What Spider Watches on TV” (Transmetropolitan #5), the character Spider is watching television, and note that he exists in a sort of slightly dystopic future with technology that is a bit more advanced than ours.

But what is remarkable about television in this future is that there is a certain kind of advertisement technique called “block consumer incentive bursts” or “buybombs.” The idea is that you are exposed to some bizarre psychedelic imagery for some brief period of time. While this is going on, no advertisements are apparent. But somehow, countless ads are encoded phenomenally in an implicit way in the image, packed like compressed phenomenal data conveyed through normal perception.

So, when you next go to sleep, all the compressed advertisements unpack in your dreams in a discernible, linear sequence.

I use this as an analogy for how I experience what happens between the gutters in the comics experience. Each panel is like a flash of compressed phenomenal data that unpacks like a burst in my imagination. This is very different even from Soviet montage and chaos cinema, where the contents between film cuts unpack in a more or less graduated, temporally extended way, which makes the experience less intense. For, all the important information that needs to be processed is given at least implicitly – but still somewhat overwhelmingly (or at least stimulatingly) – in an initial “burst” when first viewing the panel, even though it might unpack somewhat gradually afterward. What can make the cuts intense in both film and comics is the abruptness of the transition, such that differences in the following image are forced suddenly upon our perceptual and cognitive systems without them being sufficiently ready and able to fill those gaps as fast as the changes are made. But what makes the comics experience unique in this regard is that because the contents of each panel are like flashes or bursts of unpacking information (being as such because they are still-images whose temporal extent is first given instantaneously and only secondarily being unpacked gradually), the comics transitions are often more intense. Reading comics, unlike watching a film with its series of more or less discontinuous edits, is like a series of shocks between bursts, or we might say, disruptions between eruptions, whereas the film experience is often more at best a series of disruptions between gradual proceedings. But note that Groensteen in section 7.3 of Comics and Narration discusses a stroboscopic effect in a particular comics work. This is something much more visually apparent than what I have in mind. The sort of experience I have in mind is also best described as stroboscopic, but I would use the term as a description of the structure and dynamic of the experience of nearly any comics sequence rather than just ones that show interchanging sorts of flashing imagery paced in a more or less metrically homogeneous way.]

 

McCloud explains that thus audience participation is a vital element in comics. In fact, it is important in other media too. He depicts for example a film-like sequence where a pending romantic interaction moves gradually off-screen. McCloud then distinguishes the way this participation is employed in film as opposed to in comics: “[...] while film makes use of the audience’s imaginations for occasional effects, comics must use it far more often” (McCloud  69). [So while the illusion of motion can be used for showing time and motion] “[...] the reader’s deliberate, voluntary closure is comics’ primary means of simulating time and motion” (69).

 

McCloud then says that this intimacy of creator and audience resulting from closure is in fact greater in purely written texts. [I am not sure why. I would think it is greater in comics, as the creators give the visual data which would bring the reader’s imagined comics work closer to what the creators had in mind. Perhaps the idea is that the more the reader must contribute, the closer they must move toward the author. But I am not sure.] McCloud will now look at the craft in comics which brings about this intimacy (69).

 

McCloud will distinguish six kinds of panel transitions:

{1} moment-to-moment [showing moments from one continuous action, in a cinematic sort of way]

{2} action-to-action [where we move between one character’s or thing’s actions or activities in the sense of a series of joined actions, as in when we enumerate a series of things a person said or did in some event.]

{3} subject-to-subject [which moves from one character or thing to another]

{4} scene-to-scene [which jumps across large extents of time and space, rather then merely showing the same event from different temporal and spatial perspectives]

{5} aspect-to-aspect [where time is more or less not changing but spatial perspective on the scene are]

{6} non-sequitur [where there is no logical relation between panels at all.]

 

So let us look more closely at the illustrations.

 

1) Moment-to-Moment Transitions

These require very little closure [and the closure involved in them seems to tend toward the automatic perceptual closure at work in the cinematic illusion of motion. From the examples, we see differences between the panels, but in most cases, the material in the panels is largely the same from one panel to the next. However, some small detail or slightly modified aspect will tell us that change or motion have occurred.]

 

 

 

2) Action-to-Action Transitions

 

[Here depicted actions seem to be accomplishments or points where states of affairs have shifted to the point where they can obtain a different propositional sort of description. In the prior case, we might say: The spider is close. Now, the spider is a little closer. In these cases, it seems more like roughly the same state of affairs or brute fact in the world that has modulated slightly. Or, if the state of affairs did change enough to warrant a very different propositional description, perhaps that shift came about gradually and foreseeably. In action-to-action, it seems that we are dealing with one subject for which different states can be attributed. So in the example, we might have: The baseball player is waiting for the pitch. The baseball player hits the ball. For the next example: The man pours the champagne. The man drinks the champagne. The man burps the gas. And for the last one: The car is moving quickly. The car hits a tree.]

 

 

3) Subject-to-Subject Transitions

 

These transitions involve a change of subject. [The idea here seems to be that it is a combination of change of subject and change of status. Also, the subject seems like it can be a character or thing, including a landscape, as in the first example. So in a propositional form, we might have for the examples below: The ax murderer is about to kill the victim. The sound of the victim’s screams were heard outside in the city. For the second example: A man wonders what more can go wrong. A woman replies that at least Jerry has not called. The phone rings (and is possibly Jerry after all). The third one suggests that the events are not in sequence but are instead simultaneous; however, they are distinct actions made by separate characters: A runner crosses the finish line. At the same moment, the time-keeper clicks the stopwatch.]

 

 

Scene-to-Scene Transitions

 

Here we jump significant distances in time and space. [It seems that in order to make the transition fluid, certain devices might be used, like a narrator’s ‘voice’ telling us we have changed time and/or place. Otherwise, perhaps the jump will be obvious on account of the context or the available visual clues.]

 

 

 

Aspect-to-Aspect Transitions

 

Here the change is one of spatial perspective, with less emphasis on a change of time. [We are quite familiar with camera angle and focus shifts films. We see a continuously unfolding event, but all the while we jump from one perspective to another, with continuity techniques helping the transitions to be ‘invisible’. In the examples below, there does not seem to be an importance on continuity as much as giving a broadened outlook on a situation.]

 

 

Non-Sequitur Transitions

 

Here there is no logical connection whatsoever between the panels. [There is thus no inherent continuity.]

 

McCloud then further discusses the non-sequitur transitions. He wonders, “is it possible for any sequence of panels to be totally unrelated to each other?” He does not think so. For, “No matter how dissimilar one image may be to another there is a kind of [...] alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring of combinations” (73). He then seems to hint that the connections are made secondarily upon further consideration [as the machinery of phenomenal synthesis works to homogenize the heterogeneity by bringing the differences under possible commonalities.] He writes,

By creating a sequence with two or more images, we are endowing them with a single [...] overriding identity, and forcing the viewer to consider them as a whole. However different they had been, they now belong to a single organism.

(73)

[The following is the page where the quotation comes from, and it visually demonstrates his point.]

 

In the next part of this chapter, McCloud examines the prevalence of these six types of transitions in different kinds of comics or different creators. It is a sort of quantitative analysis, as he counts the occurrences, and compares them using graphs. We learn that in a Jack Kirby superhero comic, transitions were predominantly action-to-action, with subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene trailing behind. McCloud finds roughly this same distribution in a wide variety of genres and creators, both American and European (75). He explains the prevalence of these transition types as being the result of certain story-telling needs that we have when we treat a story as being a series of events (76). These three transition types “show things happening in concise efficient ways” (76). However, the first type, which decomposes one continuous action down into a series of temporally proximate moments, accomplishes (with regard to story-telling purposes) what can be accomplished in just two or so panels of the action-to-action type. The fifth type of transition, which only gives different visual aspects of the same situation, accomplishes nothing with regard to advancing the events of a story (77). And non-sequiturs have no narrative purpose at all. [I can imagine however that certain sequences, like surreal hallucinatory sorts, can fit within a conventional story, when a character’s deranged mental state is being portrayed. But here the whole non-sequitur structured sequence can be seen as one unit that fits within the logical narrative sequence surrounding it.] McCloud notes that some experimental comics, as for example early Art Spiegelman works, have very unconventional distributions of transition types.

 

McCloud then examines the transition-type distributions for works by Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka. We find that action-to-action transitions are still predominant but not as much as in the other cases we considered. And subject-to-subject are nearly as prevalent as action-to-action. In addition to these types, we also find many moment-to-moment transitions, and as well we find many aspect-to-aspect ones, which are uncommon in the west. [We might here think for example of the sorts of still-life scenes we see often in films by Ozu.] McCloud says that these aspect-to-aspect transitions are “most often used to establish a mood or a sense of place,” and when they appear, “time seems to stand still in these quiet, contemplative combinations” (79). McCloud continues, “Rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments, the reader here must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments” (79). McCloud finds many other Japanese works to have a high incidence of this fifth transition type, and he wonders why. One reason he offers is that the page-length of Japanese works was much greater, as instead of the stories being told in short installments they were originally printed in large anthologies. For this reason, “the pressure isn’t as great on any one installment to show a lot ‘happening’” (80). The second explanation McCloud offers is a cultural difference between East and West. Western culture, he says, is more goal oriented and usually does not wander, while “in the East, there’s a rich tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art” (81). McCloud further explains the differences between Japanese and Western comics with the idea that the Eastern style has a preference for intervals. [At this point I am a little confused. The Western style was supposedly more apt to exclude intervening details of activity, for the sake of giving just the important events that advance the story toward some goal. So would not the Western style make more use of exclusions and intervals? McCloud might be speaking more about an exclusion of activity in the Eastern style, where significance is conveyed without reference to patterns of development but rather somehow elliptically through absences of different sorts. In sum, McCloud’s point might be that there is an absence of action in Eastern comics, but not an absence of depiction. And these absences of action are intervals in a sense. But I do not know. See pages 82-84.] McCloud notes that excluded elements in artistic works in the East were still regarded as being a part of that work (82). This can take the form of negative space in visual art or silence in music (82). McCloud then observes that in the last century or so, Western artistic styles have come to adopt ideas of fragmentation and rhythm from Asia and Africa. This came to be seen in many new styles, with one prominent example being minimalism (83).

 

McCloud then moves to a demonstration of the role of subtraction in comics story crafting, especially in how simple removals of panels can vary the story drastically. He has us consider the following relatively elaborate story.

He then shows how the apparent meaning of the story changes by subtracting a large number of the panels. Then he shows this principle again by subtracting a few more. And we see it demonstrated one last time when we are down to just two panels.

 

[McCloud’s next point reminds me of Iser’s notion that the author select’s the fragments on the basis of how they think the reader might creatively configure the elements and interpretatively and imaginatively fill in the gaps.] McCloud explains that to strike the balance between too much subtraction and not enough, “creators regularly make assumptions about their readers’ experiences” (85). One such assumption, which is culturally contingent, is that the audience will read the panels from left to right.

 

Another problem is that “As closure between panels becomes more intense, reader interpretation becomes far more elastic” (86). [The idea here seems to be that the less connected the contents of consecutive panels are in an obvious way, the less control the comics creator has in the way the reader fills in the gaps.] Sometimes the connections are intentionally ambiguous so that there will not be some certain interpretation on the reader’s part [but rather they are left guessing or wondering, being uncertain as to what to make of the situation]. Also, closure can happen within a panel when for example we only see a small part of a situation and we need to fill in the rest using our imagination and inferential faculties. He writes, “By showing little or nothing of a given scene [...] and offering only clues to the reader [...] the artist can trigger any number of images in the reader’s imagination” (86).

 

McCloud then gives a sequence of six panels with just dialogue and sounds to show how the reader makes visual closure on the basis of sound clues (87). [This could be interesting in that it might be a sort of synaesthetic sort of closure.]

 

[So these are instances of closure happening within a panel.] Yet McCloud is still the most fascinated with inter-panel closure. [He then notes the element of animation involved in this sort of closure. In the same way that an animator might ‘tween’ two distant moments of action by drawing the series of small continuous intermediary steps, our minds in a sense conduct this same procedure.] “We already know that comics asks the mind to work as a sort of in-betweener - - filling in the gaps between panels as an animator might” (88).

 

But McCloud thinks there is more to closure than this inter-panel tweening. [As we will see, this other element is possibly a sort of synaesthetic closure.] To bring this other feature to light, he shows a four panel aspect-to-aspect sequence of a woman cooking. He asks if the sounds were confined merely to the panels where they were displayed, or if we hear them outside the panels as well. [At this point, what McCloud is saying is not entirely clear to me. At first we might think he is saying that we still hear for example the chopping sound from the second panel after having moved to the third panel where we simply see the woman’s face. But then he says that the reason we hear sounds outside the panels is for the following reason. When looking at the panels, we are confined to no more than the visual sensory mode. But in between panels, we are confined to no sense whatsoever. And thus between the panels we are liberated to engage all our senses. So what is not clear to me is whether he is saying that we only introduce our other senses in the transition between panels, or if in fact they can carry over such that we hear sounds within the panels. Also, what about the panels where the sounds appear. Is it that we do not hear them in those panels of first appearance, where vision dominates the experience, and we have to wait for the gutter to hear them? I think McCloud might be making a more general point about the functioning of the gutter, and maybe that point is that because intermittently throughout the comics work we have periods of sensory non-constriction, that has a global effect on our capacities to be liberated from the strictly visual mode of perception even when simply looking at the panel contents. Below are the passages I am discussing, and I think they are important from a phenomenological standpoint, given their relevance to synaesthesia.]

 

 

McCloud then uses the metaphor of the reader leaping into a sort of unrestricted void between each panel, and he wonders, “is it possible that closure can be so managed in some cases [...] that the reader might learn to fly?” (90). [He does not follow up on this question, and it is also not clear to me what he means exactly by the reader flying. Perhaps the idea is that instead of the reader coming to the next panel, they remain in their own story imagination and let it develop all through their own free accord. But I am not sure.]

 

McCloud then returns to the topic in chapter 2 about iconic and non-iconic drawing styles, and he wonders if they affect closure. [We have not summarized this section yet, so the following will simply restate McCloud, and later we can elaborate more after we do that section.] Closure seems to be more fluid when the drawing style is iconic rather than photorealistic. This second case of realistic imagery seems to present an experience of seeing a series of still pictures rather than one of continuous action. He also says that “when comics art veers closer to concerns of the picture plane, closure can be more difficult to achieve, though for different reasons. [...] Now it’s the unifying properties of design that make us more aware of the page as a whole, rather than its individual components, the panels” (91). McCloud says that when readers are more aware of the drawing art, achieving closure involves more effort on the reader’s part (91).

 

McCloud’s next point is a sort of reiteration of his running idea that the special role of closure makes comics a unique art form, and this element brings the creator and reader together into an intimate bond [a sort of co-consciousness like Iser describes] and it also brings together into intimate contact the seen and the unseen [what is shown and left out visually, along with all the other non-visual modes of perception that come into our imaginative awareness when reading comics].

 

 

McCloud ends the chapter by noting that as the creator of this comics work we are reading, he has been working with our power of closure as best he can, asking us as readers to contribute our “world of imagination” (93).

 

 

 

 

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.

 

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