Reading for the week, “blood in the gutter”, is on how comics work.
The comic starts off with introducing the idea of “closure” which means that people perceive the whole by observing the parts. It is quite true that all of our recognition solely depend on it because we are limited to our five senses. So how can we “perceive the whole” with so little information? I guess the best answer is pointed out at the end of the comic: it’s the “little bit of faith and a world of imagination.” How so? To explain it, the way we read comic books is a great example. If the illustrator wants to show a man picking up a glass of wine, three frames would be sufficient: one for the man; one for the glass; one for his hand reaching out for the glass. Readers, based upon their experiences, will have faith and imagine the complete action of the man which all only take place in their brains. It is how our brains function, purely inherited; despite the discontinuity of the “gutters” between those comic strips, we are still able to picture what happens in between.
Now passes the theory part of comics, the next bit is on “craft”. There are six categories on the list:
- moment-to-moment
- action-to-action
- subject-to-subject
- scene-to-scene
- aspect-to-aspect
- non-sequitur
According to the statistics, the second way of frame change is mostly used in general western comics; whereas in the east, the fifth type also shows a high occurrence. The difference is in the fundamental mind set that rather than the result, eastern culture focuses on the process. They love to create a mood by slow and long intervals of time and enjoy the period.
The comic also portraits one story in four different edits, and the effect is obvious that too little or too much are both not plausible. I personally learnt from this example as a wish-to-be-a-filmmaker that it is the same in film editing. The cuts need to develop the plot in a reasonable degree that audiences can use their imagination to understand the story. Too little frames cannot express the story well enough and too much can get boring.
Overall, I love how the comic illustrates the “gutter” effect and reveals a truth about human—we all understand the world with our restricted source of information, but all we need is just “a little faith and a world of imagination” to make miracles happen.
