Comic pages summary WEEK 2 - Book Report/Review Example

This chapter of the book dealt with the really interesting idea of what McCloud calls closure, or "the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole" (137). McCloud describes how this happens in a number of different media like television and movies as well as comic books. In essence, what he means by closure is the idea that our human brains are really good at figuring out what should have happened to get something to a certain point, or what is going to happen after we see only a part of an event, or that we can supply missing information in the space between two pictures and see them as motion.

The most relevant example for comics is what McCloud calls the gutter, or the "space between the panels" (140). Basically McClouds argument is that by making different patterns in comic panels, creators can trick the reader into creating this closure and seeing a sort of movie.McCloud lists out 6 different types of transition which comic creators use to do this, which are: “moment to moment,” “action-to-action” (144), “subject-to-subject,” “scene-to-scene” (145), “aspect-to-aspect,” and “the non-sequitur” (146).

The most interesting one of these is the non-sequitur, because it shows that even though two images have nothing at all to do with each other, our brain somehow creates a connection anyway so that we can figure out some kind of “story” inside them.