Firstly, reflecting on this reading I would like to say that by providing a reading with illustrations beside important ideas creates an engaging way to convey information to students. Playing on the idea of last weeks hyper and deep attention, this style of reading allows our generation to stay focused as we are fully enthralled. Or at least that is how I felt when I saw pictures. It seems simple minded that an illustration would excite me more than words, but with the fast paced movement of every day life, seeing pictures as the main component of a reading tells me that there is less to read therefore it will be easier to understand and I will stay in a deeper state of attention. It’s a trick of the brain; just because there are illustrations in the form of a comic book does not mean that this article will be any easier to read and understand.
The idea of ‘closure’ has never really come to my attention. Drawing information together to understand the unsaid was just something I thought was part of everyday life and I didn’t realise that there was a term for it. However, exploring it in this text is quite fascination. From the time we were children playing ‘Peek-a-boo,’ to reading a novel, watching a film and everything in between, we draw conclusions- basically giving ourselves closure in knowing how something ends. It is a means of control. Naturally I am a controlling person so I struggle when I don’t know what is going to happen or what has happened in a particular moment in life, so I feel that I use this idea of closure in everyday life more than I realise.
Closure is a way to manipulate an audience into staying engaged and enthused by a particular form of media whether that be television, comics, cinema, print media and many more. Naturally people will imagine what happened in ‘the gutter,’ and anticipate a conclusion. This is where film makers can pull these preconceptions away from the audience and create a twist in a plot line. It’s interesting how authors or film makers take the ‘gutter,’ and use it to create imaginative insight in the audience.
Comic books use sequence to create the ‘gutter’ where the audience find closure. the types of sequence include:
- Moment-to-moment
- Action- to action
- Subject-to-subject
- Scene-to-scene
- Aspect-to-aspect- establishes mood or scene
- Non-sequitur- seemingly random
I believe that it would be hard to make a non-sequitur sequence due to the expanse of imagination in which people are capable. There is always a link that can be drawn between ideas regardless of how random the ideas in a sequence may seem. It may be the authors intention to create a non-sequitur sequence but the reader could take that and make it subject-to-subject for example, due to their own imaginative process.
By looking at the differences of Eastern practices as opposed to Western we can learn a lot. Not just in comics, but in music and art, the East seem to be exploring opposing ideas as what Westerners are concerned with. For example, McCloud says that “while the Western classical tradition was emphasising the continuous, connected worlds of melody and harmony, Eastern classical music was equally concerned with the role of silence!” It is necessary to study other cultures and broaden our horizons to truely get a sense of how media works. We may think we understand something in Western media, but travel to Asia and you have just opened a whole new can of worms.
Primarily, I’ve concluded that the role of the audience is of utmost important in all types of media- particularly comics. Without the audience engagement there would be no story. This reading can be linked to all forms of media. What role does the audience play in what you are trying to convey in your particular form of media?
In text quotations and images:
Scott McCloud, 1993, ‘Blood in the Gutter’, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art(Northampton, MA : Tundra Pub)
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