The Power of the Gutters: What Happens Between Panels (and What Writers Can Learn From It)

If I have learned anything from reading, writing, and studying comic books, it is that one must leave space for the reader. Even in this age of binge-watching full television series, auto-playing seasons of podcasts, or scrolling on social media into the wee hours, audiences still need the chance to pause. To refresh, to react, to reflect. Perhaps to scheme, to dream, or to theorize.

(Letting the Illustrations Do the Talking in Graphic Novels.)

What has drawn me to comics and graphic novels for so much of my life is that those moments for speculation or recalibration are present on every page. Narrative captions are separated from word balloons, sound effects stand apart from the art, and each image is divided from the next. That gap, what the industry nicknames gutters, is where the unique alchemy of a comics narrative mixes and catalyzes.

My book Body, Soul, & Comics: Graphic Religion & Graphic Medicine considers how both faith and science utilize such cracks and chasms to the same end: to communicate human experiences to the reader. Theorist Scott McCloud called the mental task performed by audiences in both connecting and animating separate panels as “closure.” The reader internalizes the separate moments, imagines a connection between them, and interprets the scene accordingly. They make connections. They make sense of the dialogue, the characters, and the action, but they also make it their own.

Not everyone writes comics, of course, but this principle is still a sound practice for all forms of storytelling. As I study a comic or write one of my own, I try to keep these principles in mind.

The gutters aren’t only functional: They’re thematic. While some writers might like to pack pages with conversation, others let the visuals dominate and breathe. These are not generally seen by readers as ‘interruptions’ or ‘slow points’ rather than space to help prepare them for that is ahead. They allow each course of the story’s meal be digested.

Giving readers space allows them to change gears. Most narratives cannot move at one speed for the whole story and, in fact, hurt their own plots or messages. Embrace the gutter! Widen and collapse it at different times and use it to signal a new movement in the music of your words.

Literary anthropologist Wolfgang Iser contended that it takes three elements to create meaning, particularly in writing. There needs to be an author (or, as Michel Foucault would later qualify, an author-function), a text of some sort, and, most importantly, an operator.

Depending on the medium, that operator could be a listener, a viewer, a player, or a reader. Regardless of the specific audience, stories that allow room for interpretation, nuance, and McCloud’s closure let their operators do their jobs. No one is going to get in their head better or more deeply than one who actually operates that mind. McCloud says to let them envision the “blood in the gutter.”

The ambiguity and the fissures left by gutters, page turns, and chapter breaks provide the author with openings that could be vital later. Like Rashomon, a scene could be viewed differently or an overlooked detail could be revealed thanks to the opportunity provided by such access points.

In a gutter-like maneuver, what if I told you now that Body, Soul, and Comics is also semi-autobiographical. Are you likely to go back and review how I characterized it at first, reshaping your initial understanding of it?

Whatever form of ‘gutters’ you feature in your work,  be prepared to violate them. A number of daring comics, from Animal Man to Testament, have used the null-space of the gutters to exhibit being that function on another plane of reality. A movie may not want to slow and reveal itself cell-by-cell, but comics are designed, in part, to feature the void.

This isn’t a suggestion to omit details or to be vague. But there is something tantalizing in seizing the right economy of words to shape a scene leanly. Specialists in flash fiction, drabble, and Twitterature know this thrill well. Even those writing an epic saga or collection of volumes can still appreciate the effectiveness of a six-word story:

For sale, baby shoes, never worn.

I tend to see it, too, in either the one-panel hits of a Far Side gag or the expediency of a webcomic like XKCD. Whether the gutters there are apparent or implied, readers’ imaginations are ready to fill them. They’re ready to work.

The ‘jump-cut’ to another scene, the break of a chapter, or the telling silence of a character leave a space not only for your readers to breathe…but also to sweat. Comics didn’t invent that space. They just made it visible.

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