The Magic of Comic Books
One of the most amazing aspects of the comic book reading experience is that every reader is an active participant in the process.
When a comic book writer starts writing the story and determining which sequential sequences the artist is going to draw in the panels, the writer is also determining how much or how little participation the reader is going to have in the story.
The Magic of Swear Words
A great example of this is the swear words. Many comics don’t have swear words, due to age ratings (like movies comic books also adhere to an age rating system), so writers have had to get creative when wanting to add emotions or verbal frustrations to their characters or story.
We’ve all seen comics where a character says “%#@$!”.
This is where the reader becomes an active participant, as the reader fills in the swears for the character, and this vocabulary of swear words fully depends on the reader’s knowledge of them.
This is where reading experiences become unique as what I think Captain Haddock (© Tintin/image below) is saying might differ from what you think he’s saying.
The Magic of the Gutter
Another example of how the reader participates in comics is from what the reader isn’t seeing, and what the writer purposely left off the page.
Take this example from the amazing comic book resource book UNDERSTANDING COMICS by Scott Macleod.
In Panel 1 we see a man attacking another man with an axe.
In the second panel, we see a scream.
The attack occurs completely in the gutter, and you dear reader are an accessory to this murder. Because it is your imagination that determines how this person was murdered. Did the assailant chop off the man’s leg? Or was it an arm? Or maybe both a leg and an arm? , etc. You determine how gruesome this murder scene was.
Not only that, you determine who got attacked, maybe this guy turned around and caught the axe before the strike? The reader won’t know until the next page if they know at all.
The Magic of the Time
In this article, I talked about comic books and their relationship with TIME.
Think of each panel as a frozen moment of time, the gutter is where time moves, and the next panel is what happens after that time has occurred.
In the Gutter seconds can pass between panels, minutes can pass, hours can pass, days can pass, weeks can pass, years and decades can pass, and lifetimes can pass.
*Pro Tip: Time can also go backward in these moments, as long as the art is reflecting it.
Page 1 from the Graphic Novel BRITTEN AND BRÜLIGHTLY by Hannah Berry, showcases time, and the passage of time better than any other comic book I’ve read.
In it, you can see Detective Britten (the protagonist) waking up, and time visibly passing in the 5 panels with the clock, and you notice the time passing isn’t consistent.
But, there is something else magically happening in that image. There is an eighth panel on the page with no border or frame, but the gutter is still there and time is still moving inside of it, and this time might be the longest or shortest of them all.
Hannah Berry (the writer/artist/creator) created a border/frame between panel 7 and panel 8 with sheer whiteness, creating the gutter and she left it up to the reader to determine how fast or slow the character got out of bed, and how long he sat there on the edge of the bed, before getting up.
This is the magic of comic books, as the reader determines (based on the previous knowledge given of the passing of time in the clocks), how long Detective Britten sits on the edge of the bed.
*Pro Tip: This article talks about Time in its relationship to comics deeper: https://medium.com/@KellyBender17/comic-writing-is-about-mastering-time-844488dc51ba
Summary:
Comic books are an interactive experience between the reader, the writer, and the art. As a comic book writer, you have to respect and understand this relationship as you write your comic book stories.
