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Scott Mccloud Blood In The Gutter Chapter 1 Summary

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In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, he names chapter three “Blood in the Gutter”. In this chapter McCloud explores within comics the topics of perception, closure and transitions. The naming of this chapter, “Blood in the Gutter” refers to the comic term “gutter”f, which McCloud explains is the empty space from one panel to the next. What happens between these panels is an active storytelling from the reader. This active participation from the viewer is what keeps the story moving so smoothly through panels. McCloud then uses the example of one panel having a man with an axe moving towards another, and then in the next panel it shows screams of agony. Now in this gutter the reader can create what happened by using their …show more content…

The gutter is the space in between the comic book panels. One goes to the next in a fluid fashion without having to walk the reader through each step. “All of you participated in the murder. All of you held the axe and chose your spot,” (McCloud 68). With the example of a gutter being in between a murder he goes on to say the murder is committed in many different ways. Since in order to have the gutter move with ease, the reader has to be an active storyteller and since this gutter is dependent on an individual level, each reader reads this murder differently. Most readers probably come to the same conclusion; that the man was murdered with an axe by the other. That conclusion can be simple enough, but each mind creates a different murder. What happens in the victims last few seconds of his lives are personally unique to each reader. Since this intimate murder happens between the two comic panels, the reader’s personal murder is within the gutter. Therefore the axe hitting its target and a wound opening means that the blood is in the …show more content…

The association seen in the gutter is the veins of the comic, pumping to the main important organs, the heart and brain. It is the flow that happens between the panels and within the gutter, “Ideas flowing into one another seamlessly,” (McCloud 90). The jump the reader can make between these gutters helps pump the scenes of the comic together towards the main story. With the gutter being the veins, the main story is the heart and brain. This networking that happens within the gutter is the veins of the story because without these relations the readers make within the gutter the story would not come across as clearly as it does. McCloud even makes a subtle relation when he starts speaking about unlikely connections. He states, “…closure for blood, gutters for veins…” (McCloud 73). The murder can be seen as the reader creating “closure” and the gutters can be veins. It is the veins that hold the blood flowing freely towards the heart. This movement from one panel to the next is what moves the story. It is the reader who is creating the veins that flow through the gutters. Without the active reader the story couldn’t move on, the blood wouldn’t pump. It is the reader who creates the veins within the gutter and hence the blood in the

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