In Scott McCloud’s chapter titled “Blood in the Gutter”, he discusses how readers of comics fill in the gaps between panels. This draws the line between what is implied and explicit in the story, and the author must know their audience to properly create implications in stories that will be understood.
McCloud specifically used the following example to explain this idea. When people see these two images next to each other, most will fill in the blanks and understand that the axe was used to hit the man in the foreground. The space between the panels, or the gutter, is where the reader’s imagination comes into play.
According to McCloud, Western comic artists tend to focus on the explicit, with action-to-action being the main panel transition. However, Eastern artists place less of an emphasis on action-to-action and tend to focus more on blank space. This can also be related to Eastern and Western music, particularly choral music.
Two examples for this would be the song Jabberwocky by Sam Pottle and the Japanese folk song Hotaru Koi. Jabberwocky is a choral arrangement of the Lewis Carroll story of the same name. It is a very Western arrangement, focusing on loud, explosive sound, much like how Western comic artists focus heavily on action. The latter, however, creates space by splitting the choir and having them sing offset from each other. This would not be possible without utilizing empty space and echoing in order to produce the sound, much like how Eastern comic artists will focus more heavily on creating a space and giving time to silence.
Neither technique is superior, but they are distinct. The media that they produce, whether that is music or comic books, is reflective of whether the author places emphasis on the explicit or the implicit.
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