Understanding Comics

While I was on the fence about whether I liked the comic as a whole I did find some of Scott McCloud's ideas quite interesting. I didn't always agree with his opinion but with his ideas of reading in between the gutters of the panels that actually contain all of the action I definitely agreed with him. 

In some circumstances there’s an action that happens in between two panels and it’s up to us as the readers to use context clues and logic to piece together what happened. In a lot of cases it’s simple things that we do everyday or fairly often to which in turn our brain automatically understands the action that happened in space of the gutter to get us to the next panel’s action or scene. 

An example of this would be the two panels of the man sleeping and there’s a spider on the blanket and then in the next panel the spider is in a different spot even closer to the man sleeping. Our minds naturally put two and two together and come up with the conclusion that the spider must have moved from the first spot to where were are now seeing it in the second panel. 

The gutter can also be used to switch point of view from “subject to subject” or “scene to scene.” And like the other concepts we are shown multiple examples. The tricky bit gets down to where the “non-sequitur” transitions come in because there is no logic to what’s happening in the gutters as it transitions from panel to panel. 

Understanding the comics have a lot to do with understanding how to read them correctly and put two and two together logically to really get what’s happening in the story. If you were unable to read in between the action happening from panel to panel you’d end up completely lost and confused as to what is happening.
I think with some aspects he made understanding how comics work more confusing and made things more complicated than they needed to be but in this aspect he did a great job of explaining how to read the action happening in the gutters of the comics.