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Filip Stojanovski
Contemporary Storytelling: Comics and Animation
Comics’ Grammar: Closure
McCloud (1993, p.63) refers to the concept of closure
as crucial in sealing readers’ involvement when partaking in reading
comics. Closure is defined as the notion of observing the parts, but
perceiving the whole. It is omnipresent in everyday life – humans
perform "rounding" of impressions all the time. From
recognizing a building by just glancing at some part of it to watching a
series of still photographs shown at a rate of 24 per second and seeing
movement while in a cinema, closure is often automatic.
Reader's mind supplements story
elements from the white space between the images, called "the
gutter", accomplishing closure. |
Comics do the same, making the reader an accomplice
in the act of storytelling. Use of the reader’s imagination when
trying to make the connection between the two images on the page makes
the reader involved. The real action of the comics does not take place
in the rectangles with drawings inside, but in the mind of the reader.
What is unseen tells as much about the story, as that what is explicitly
seen. The space between the images, "the gutter," has as much
to say as the images themselves. Similarly like the absence of colored
people from "the funnies" in the Sunday newspaper after World
War II was saying at least as much about the racial discrimination as
the presence of stereotyped caricatures in the earlier ages.
In regard to closure, a drastic example is the
process of watching television, analyzed by Marshal McLuhan in his most
famous book "Understanding Media" (1963, pp.332-335). It is
not the content of the program, but the perceptional properties of the
medium that force it to the viewer. The human eye can accept very little
of the information (just some of the few million pixels created by the
motion of the ray of light across the TV screen) offered by this very
low definition medium, thus forcing the mind to supplement for the gap.
As a result, TV creates an involved, addicted viewer. In fact,
concerning the level of required closure, the television is a medium
that can match comics, and has indeed been identified as its prime
competitor in this regard (McLuhan, 1963, p.165). The fact that the
viewer’s involvement is automatic and involuntary, together with its
propagandistic value, makes it rather harmful. Its centralistic nature,
which conditions the viewer to watching without questioning, is what
makes it such a good advertiser (brainwasher).
According to McLuhan (1963, p.169), the advent of
comics, as well as other media capable of creating
involvement in a similar fashion, indicates a profound change in the way
humans perceive the world around them.
Contents
| Foreword |
Glossary |
Works Cited
Comics: Bits of History |
Modern Age |
Great Adventurers |
Vocabulary
| Grammar: Closure
Animation: Origins |
An Early Animator |
Classical Animation |
Making an Animation
| Epilogue
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