McCloud and McPhee: Closure and creative reading
In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud writes a whole chapter (“Blood in the Gutters”) on closure, the mental act of filling in pieces that are missing. In comics, much of what’s missing happens between panels. “Whatever the mysteries within each panel, it’s the power of closure between panels that I find interesting”, writes McCloud. “There’s something strange and wonderful that happens in this blank ribbon of paper” (p 88, Understanding Comics)
Closure captures John McPhee’s advice for writing nonfiction: let the reader do the work. In an interview with the L. A. Review of Books Radio Hour, McPhee said:
Well, if there’s creative writing there is also creative reading… I can mention, as a writer, several things, like cornshocks and pheasants or whatever and that conjures a picture of autumn, in Iowa or something like that. And the reader is doing most of the work. Stay away from the reader. Let her read it. Let him read it.
In Draft No. 4, McPhee explains one instance where he leaves the reader to fill in the picture. At one point in Encounters with the Archdruid, David Brower steps out of a rubber raft, right before the boat enters Upset Rapid. Floyd Dominy, Brower’s archenemy, calls Brower a coward. Brower admits that he’s “chicken.” Then McPhee inserts a multi-line break in the text.
The next paragraph lists mountains in the Sierra Nevada which Brower was the first to ascend. That break speaks. That break is the gutter between the panels. It’s where the magic happens, the magic conjured in the mind of the reader.
July 14, 2022 comics writing closure