Chapter Three- Blood in the Gutter

In this chapter of the book McCloud describes the concept of closure and its importance to design. He describes closure as “the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” It allows us to create a picture using only limited parts by making connections and assumptions. In movies or animation it cannot retell the whole story down to the last second, the creator has to make choices and selections to still tell the story but in a shorter amount of time. This is when closure is important and film makers use long music sequences with particular significant images to help the audience fill in the gaps. McCloud compares the use of closure from comics and film and explains that even though it is used to varying degrees in both forms of media closure is still and important element and allows the audience to exercise their imagination and fill in certain parts of the storyline themselves.

McCloud categorized the different types of transitions in comics according to how much each frame has changed; whether it is moment to moment shots like someone blinking, an action to action shot like a car crash, subject to subject shots where the panels focus on different subjects or scene to scene shots where it shows different locations or different time frames, aspect-to-aspect and non-sequitur panels. McCloud explains about the different categories and how they have all been used in the history of comics and how comics have evolved to mainly use action-to-action, subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene as the authors have begun to realize our sense of closure and how in two panels it can tell the same story as one displayed in 10 or so. Even though these categories were to describe the different transitions between panels of a comic they are also similar to that of movies and animations. Like comic authors animators and film makers have also realized the power of closure and how people can fill in the missing gaps and still understand the storyline.


In class we studied the Cane toad animation. After reading this article and watching this animation the concept of closure became much more apparent and I then started to realize just how little detail or information that has to be given in order to create a much larger picture. According to McClouds different panel-to-panel categories the animation uses a lot of subject-to-subject shots. An example of this is when Baz gets run over by the lawn mower and when he gets run over by the truck , we don’t see him physically get squished or shredded up but the gory scenes that follow only help us as the audience to put two and two together based on our past experiences and piece in the gaps of the scene.

Another example is The Lion King where in the opening title sequence all the animals are running towards something, we don’t see them running all the way to the “rock” rather there are subject-to-subject shots where we connect the pictures and see that all the animals are running the same way and so are all running to the same place. A voice over didn’t have to tell us that, and neither did a caption, but we can predict it through our sense of closure.

Selection of detail is used by film makers and animators and allows the animation or movie to be shorter without reducing the storyline. It relies on closure in order for this technique to work. Just like the theatrical idea that “less is more” McCloud explains that with selection of detail “finding the balance between too much and too little is crucial.”

When you are reading a comic or watching a movie you never consciously fill in the gaps, it is an automatic thing that comes from past experiences. After reading this chapter it has made me much more conscious of closure and how my experiences have helped me to fill in the gaps. I realized just how much film makers ask the audience to leave to their imagination yet we all seem to get much the same storyline.