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In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talked about the concept of “closure” in relation to comics reading, which is more or less the idea of the audience filling in the blanks (or gutters) between drawn panels in order to complete the action. It reminds me of when I dabbled in doing simple Flash animations way back in the day where you’d draw a ball hanging in mid-air, then draw it partially squashed on the ground a little ways away, and then rounded in the air again a little further than that, and then you’d use a function to tell the program to make a bunch of the in-between pictures in order to complete the animation of the ball bouncing.
Comics leave the bouncing of the ball to your mind, and in a sense it’s the job of the writer/artist to program you properly so that you fill the in-betweens in a meaningful fashion. Related to this is the idea of allowing the spaces to exist, such as Sara Ryan discusses in her post on getting a robot to make a sandwich and how that applies to comics writing.
If you haven’t ever heard of the robot making a sandwich thing (and don’t want to check out her blog), the gist is an old thinkpiece where you’re supposed to instruct a robot to make you a sandwich. This robot has no AI to speak of and no knowledge other than that you provide to it, so the command “Make me a sandwich” is not going to work. Even going step-by-step through the whole process, people tend to omit certain things they take for granted, like how you would spread mayonnaise with the knife. Also did you tell it what type of knife, and where the knife is, and which end of the knife to use? As you’re probably getting the idea, the situation is a teaching tool for beginning programmers and the like on how you need to list out all necessary steps for an operation to run correctly and not assume anything is just “common knowledge” or “common sense”.
Now in her blog Ryan is using this to bring up the pitfall of newbie comics writers trying to show more than one action in the same panel. Your artist will understandably want to throttle you if your panel description were to say “Bill gets a knife out of the drawer, dips it in the mayonnaise and begins spreading it on his sandwich”. Similarly she talks about the pitfall of having a character display two wildly different emotions in the same panel, although that’s a case where we have deliberately cheated in the past, to what I think is fun effect. It’s good to know the rules, but following them all the time without exception can get pretty boring.
Anyhow, I don’t intend to retread her ground, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that humans aren’t robots and the successful comics creator is going to take full advantage of not having to show and explain every little step. Instead, it’s all about picking out the most important moment from an imagined series of them. I seem to recall McCloud using the example of someone getting into a car, and offering up several possibilities of showing them approaching the car, getting out their keys, opening the lock, opening the door, etc. etc. until they finally drive away. Even in a motion picture this sequence has the potential to be excrucriatingly irrelevant to the story, but McCloud aptly displays the insane waste of space it becomes in comics form (unless your story is all about mundane minutiae, I suppose).
So assuming the panel needs to be there at all, which moment is most important to the story? If the person forgot or lost their keys, the artist might best be served capturing them at the moment they are standing at the car door, fumbling in their pocket or purse. If it’s all about transition between areas, capture them as they’re climbing behind the wheel. The audience will fill in the rest, but they’ll have that “snapshot” to mold their perceptions around.
And for that matter, consider the matter of dialogue. If you took a comics image as a literal representation of life, people would be holding the same facial expressions and body poses for entire lengthy speeches. In the last panel of this page, Chuck is not leaned in towards the camera, frozen in place, for the all those words. How would he even enunciate properly without moving his mouth? The sandwich robot would not understand this, but a person hears Chuck’s voice in their head and imagines his mouth moving and his eyebrows waggling conspiratorially. What’s more, that little miracle happens without us even much thinking about it. We’re just wired that way, the same way we see people as excited and happy when we tell them we have a present for them rather than what they happen to look like in a freeze frame of that reaction.
Oh, the perils of the pause button. I mean, this is technically a legitimate moment of their reaction, something that literally happens and is gone again in the blink of an eye — but in a comic you’d be well advised to stay away from choosing it unless you want the audience molding their closure around “Holy crap is she stoned?”
You can’t and shouldn’t show the entire making of the sandwich. But choose wisely.