Comic Reading: 2

          I remember learning about what McCloud refers to as “closure” in a psychology class.  I believe it was Freud who first hypothesized about this subject.  It’s a subconscious thing, something that our minds just do to make sense of our world.  It is based on memory, and we just trust that things and people remain how they are after we have moved on.  Comparing with the reading on Duchamp, McCloud writes about the audience of comics as “a willing and conscious collaborator”(65) of the medium.  The audience is a necessary part of the creative process.

          Because comics are fractured panels of imagery, they rely on the audience’s subconscious ability to connect the frames and interpret them as a fluid story. 

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          The medium of the comic forces the audience to utilize closure much more than most other mediums, such as film.  There are six dominant categories of transitions, and they all rely on the audience to fill in the gaps, more or less.  However, it is up to the author to balance what information they choose to add or leave out.  The audience has to then fill in the blanks using all of their senses.

          The gutter forces the viewer to imagine time passing between frames, creating the illusion of time and motion.  Words representing sound also create this illusion of passing time, and panels themselves have the same effect.  All of these elements combined create the illusions of motion, time and space.

A Seemingly Useless Comic Book for Our Time, Just Taking Up Space