Chapter three touched on a reoccurring theme in this class: the reader’s desire for closure. However, the author didn’t just focus on closure in the sense of story’s end, he also examined human ability to “fill in the gaps” when looking at an incomplete image, and tying that back into human symbolic capacity.
This chapter is useful because it can be applied to just about any form of story telling. With comics, there is a spin on the idea of ‘showing not telling,’ since comics are primarily made up of images (I imagine it’d be quite difficult to tell instead of showing). With comics, it is more of a question of: “How much do I need to show?” In a lot of actions movies made today it seems like the directors try to compensate a weak plot or flat characters by putting in a lot of explosions and really graphic sex/violence. But after the smoke clears there is little resonance and no one cares anymore.
Any good story telling—no matter what the medium—is going to rely to some extent on the reader’s ability to “fill in the gutter.” It forces the reader to commit to the story and become an active participant instead of just a passive observer. This is basically what Hemingway was doing with his ‘iceberg technique.’ I believe this participation leads to a story’s resonance more than anything else.
Along the same lines, on pages 84-85, McCloud tells the same story four times using a different number of panels each time. In all four cases, the first and last panels are the same, so the basic plot remains the same even though one comic has fifty two panels while the other has only two. This is a great demonstration of how to determine what is essential to a story. The first comic has a lot of extraneous information, while the third and fourth comics leave the protagonist flat. The second comic seems to be a pretty good balance of the two (though I may have chosen to do it a little differently). By breaking a story up into these panels, it is easier to see what information is essential to the plot, what is important to character development, and what is extraneous. Cross-medium experimentation—whether from short story to comic, or comic to movie, etc—could be a useful technique in getting to the heart of a story.
