What It Really Takes to Get from Here to There (Analyzing Comics 101: Closure)

Reading a comic book is easy–even when there are no words to be read. You just look at a picture, and then at the next picture, and so on. But why do any of them make sense side-by-side? What is your brain doing as it leaps from image to image?

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines the Gestalt psychology principle of “closure” as the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (though it more specifically indicates a viewer filling in visual gaps between disconnected parts) and applies it to comics gutters: “Nothing is seen between panels, but experience tells you something must be there!” He goes on to explain: “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.”

McCloud focuses his analysis on gutters and therefore types of transitions possible between panels (though closure is independent of panels and gutters, since insets and interpenetrating images work the same ways). He comes up with six types:

Image result for scott mccloud panel transitions

They work reasonably well, but his focus on panel transition has always struck me as slightly off. When I use it in class, students often don’t come to a clear consensus when analyzing any particular panel sequence. Moment-to-moment and action-and-action, for instance, are often ambiguous, sometimes combining identical leaps in time. And since actions do occur in McCloud’s moment-to-moment examples (a women blinks!), it’s not exactly clear what constitutes an “action.” Aspect-to-aspect can also be indistinguishable from subject-to-subject, both of which may or may not involve a movement in time, and so may or may not also be moment-to-moment or even action-to-action. And scene-to-scene might be a location leap and so also a kind of aspect-to-aspect at the big picture level, or a scene-to-scene can be in the same location but at a different time–so then how much time has to pass for an old scene to become a new scene?

These are annoying questions, but they really do come up when you try to breakdown a panel sequence with a roomful of students. So instead of categorizing transitions, my colleague Nathaniel Goldberg and I categorized types of closure while drafting our essay “Caped Communicators: Conversational Depiction and Superhero Comics.” Instead one all-purpose “perceiving the whole” process, we see four very different kinds of closure, each of which can occur by itself or in combinations.

Spatial:  Subject matter drawn in separate images is depicted as existing in physical relationship to each other, typically as a result of panel framing. (What McCloud identifies as aspect-to-aspect, subject-to-subject, and some scene-to-scene transitions require spatial closure.)

Temporal:  Undrawn events are depicted to take place outside of events drawn in separate images, typically as a result of panel transitions and so occurring as if in gutters. (What McCloud identifies as moment-to-moment, action-to-action, and some subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene transitions require temporal closure.)

Causal: Drawn action is understood to have been caused by an element absent from a current image but drawn in a preceding image. (None of McCloud’s transitions, not even action-to-action, accounts for this type of closure.)

Associative: A metaphorical relationship is depicted between two images in which one image is understood to represent some idea about the other image. (Though McCloud does not identify this type of closure, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden in Drawing Words Writing Pictures add “symbolic” to McCloud’s list of transition types. Such symbolic transitions require associative closure.)

It always helps to look at specific examples, so consider this three-panel sequence at the top of page 28 in Watchmen #8:

In the first image, artist Dave Gibbons draws the shadow of a statuette cast over the face of a frightened man lying on the floor. The second image shows the statuette in the fist of an attacker. Taken together, spatial closure is required to understand that the two images occur within a few feet of each other, each image drawn from one of the two men’s points of view. The second image also requires temporal closure because the statuette is behind the attacker’s head at an angle that would not cast the shadow seen on the victim’s face in the first image. Gibbons therefore also depicts a movement forward in time during which the attacker has cocked his arm back to strike.

The third image depicts a jack-o-lantern crashing to the floor with some falling books. It uses all four forms of closure. The pumpkin exists in the same space as the two now undrawn men (spatial closure). The pumpkin is crushed at a moment immediately following the second image (temporal closure). The falling books have been knocked down by the now undrawn attacker of the previous image (causal). And, because it resembles a human head and breaks open at the moment a reader anticipates the statuette striking the man’s head, Gibbons implies that the man’s head has been similarly damaged (associative).

A close reading of the sequence also reveals some confusion. Regarding causal closure, it is unclear how the attacker overturned the books at this moment since the act of swinging the statuette at the victim on the ground does not clearly involve his intentionally or unintentionally knocking over the bookcase in the same gesture. Instead, Gibbons may have attempted to suggest that the attacker struck his victim and then afterwards overturned the bookcase—an ambiguous two-step action otherwise absent.

I’m guessing Gibbons was fulfilling a directive in Alan Moore’s famously meticulously detailed script, producing this unintended gap in its execution. To address panel transitions that cause only confusion, McCloud includes “non-sequitur” as a type of transition that “offers no logical relationship between panels whatsoever!” So then a non-sequitur produces no closure at all–and so isn’t really type of closure, but is the absence of closure. Which is why we don’t include it as our fifth category.

So our closure types are deeply indebted to McCloud, but I think they also improve on his. I’ll be testing these out in my classroom soon, so hopefully my students will agree. More on that later.

Blood in the Gutters

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of student papers from Phillip Troutman’s class at George Washington University focusing on comics form in relation to Scott McCloud’s theories. For more information on the assignment, see Phillip’s introduction here.
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Scott McCloud is quick to introduce the concept of closure as the defining aspect of comics and is nearly as quick to locate it as existing in “the gutter”, the blank space between the panels in comics.  This is a useful shorthand, but as he further develops these ideas it becomes clear that closure is actually a continuous involuntary act on the part of the reader that does not rely on the panel or gutter at all.  In fact, closure occurs within panels quite frequently and is the result of time being represented, usually implied by sound or motion.  As McCloud explains, in a purely visual medium like comics, time, or the motion and sound that implies time, can only be represented through the space on the page.  In comics, space and time are the same.  This reduces the panel and its negative space, the gutter, to icons that indicate that time and space is being divided.  In effect, the panel and gutter have less to do with the actual process of closure, that is, perceiving the whole from parts, and more to do with indicating what is a part.
 

 

So as this image from McCloud’s Understanding Comics demonstrates, closure can occur without the use of intervening gutters to indicate the passage of time.  As McCloud explains, the movement of our eye across the page is enough for us to understand that time is passing and to make sense of what is happening.  Gutters are not necessary.  This leads me to conclude that it is the act of scanning the page that generates closure.  By scanning I mean the almost involuntary movement of our eyes across the page and the unconscious synthesis of the images on the page into a narrative.

Consider the polyptych, a technique used in Guardians of the Kingdom by Tom Gauld.  A polyptych in the comics world is where “a moving figure or figures is imposed over a continuous background” (McCloud pg 115).  The polyptych provides an example of closure occurring in one setting, likely with one subject or a small group acting or talking (that is, providing sound or motion to imply time and generate closure), but it is a technique that requires the use of panels as an organizational framework, despite the fact that all the closure-generating action of a character occurring within one setting could only logically be explained as a passage of time.  Otherwise it would appear as the sudden multiplication of one character into many copies, something I think it is safe to say could easily be ruled out through context.
 

 
For example, this polyptych from Gauld’s aforementioned work uses one scene and only two characters, both moving and speaking and thereby implying the passage of time.  It also has a very basic set of panels dividing the image which helps to emphasize and clarify the passage of time.  The panels help to organize the image on the page, but they are not necessary to understand the image, which is to say, to generate closure.  If there is some doubt about this assertion, imagine the page without the panels.  Although it might be momentarily confusing, reading the whole page would provide the necessary context for closure to occur.  In fact, in this particular instance, even that much probably wouldn’t be necessary, as the reader would be aware that there are only two characters in this book. Nonetheless, the panels do help and McCloud’s characterization of them as icons for the division of time seems to make sense, although they might be more accurately described as indices.  An icon bears a visual similarity to the thing it represents, whereas an index does not necessarily resemble anything, but indicates that what it represents is occurring. As panels and gutters can’t be said to visually resemble the passage of time, but instead indicate that it is happening, they are indices.

Why, if they are not necessary, do we see panels and gutters so often in comics?  The answer is that while they are not necessary for closure, they are necessary for comics as a format.  They help us to organize the page and are the author’s means of steering our scanning of the images.  Imagine, once more, the page above without panels.  But this time imagine that it is huge, far larger than any book would allow, so large that it would take some time to scan the whole image from top to bottom.  In that case, the winding wall and real time needed to scan the page would provide all the indication of the passage
of time necessary.  Closure would certainly occur without the panels.  In essence, panels are not necessary for closure; they are an accident of the format that has been developed by authors as a means of directing the process of closure, thereby shaping the meaning we draw from the comic.

There is further evidence to suggest that while closure doesn’t strictly require panels, comics do.  More broadly, any visual narrative art requires panels and if those panels are not explicitly drawn, they are implied.  The Bayeux tapestry, an 11th century embroidery depicting William the Conqueror’s successful invasion of England, although clearly not a comic in the modern form, works just like one.  It combines images, definitively on the iconic side of the spectrum, and words to tell a story.  It scans from left to right and is
broken down into a number of scenes, although none are explicitly numbered or
otherwise differentiated.  But the fact remains that the panels are implied.  The need for organization in the images was still present and panels, or in this case scenes, are apparently the instinctual way to depict this.

It is my contention that closure occurs constantly through our scanning of the images and the involuntary creation of meaning out of the juxtaposed images on the page.  The panels and their negative space, the gutters, act only as a way of organizing these images for, no doubt according to the author, more meaningful scanning.  Further, I would argue that panels are actually just a formalization of our natural scanning and is due mostly to the physical format that comics take.  The fact that comics generally come in books, that
is on pages read left to right, top to bottom, has necessitated the use of panels. Specifically it solves the problem of moving down the page, something the Bayeux tapestry doesn’t have to deal with and consequently didn’t create a system like explicit panels to direct the reader.  I do not disagree with McCloud that “closure is comics”, indeed any visual narrative must have closure because that’s how we make sense of them. And I would go farther, perhaps, than McCloud by stating that comics are panels, whether those panels are implied or explicit, because the format demands it.  But, as I believe I have shown, there is no transitive property at work here; panels and their gutters are comics, comics is closure, but panels and gutters are not closure.