Is He Dead? — Closure and Its Role in Comics
“Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” by Scott McCloud was the starting point in my journey of viewing comics through an academic lens, so bringing it back full circle, this is where my journey ends. Throughout his book, McCloud makes many bold claims about the scholarship of comics — some that I agree with and some that I do not. However, his boldest statement by far is that “Comics is closure.” When I read this statement I was intrigued by it, and his description of closure as an involuntary act that dominates the comics medium (McCloud 67-68). Thus, I wanted to create a comic that explains the marvelous concept of closure through its structure/plot. I also sought to make this comic an experience in which the readers’ employment of closure would be distorted or erroneous to demonstrate how central closure is to creating the meaning of a story.
For my final project, I made a 4-strip comic that spans over 4 pages with a total of 16 panels. Inspired by McCloud’s example on pg.84-85 of how comics can be additive or reductive, I used that same structure and modified it to explain and distort closure. Instead of taking away panels, like McCloud’s example, with each page I added more panels to disrupt the reader’s assumptions about the story and thus “mess-up” their closure. Initially in pages 1 thorough 3, the comic seems like a murder story as the main character (Jamal) is stalked by a knife-wielding monster who is trying to kill him. However, once at the 4th page, the reader realizes that Jamal was not getting stalked and murdered at all — the comic is actually depicting the filming of a movie! I deliberately made the gutters in the first page large, as this is the page in which the readers will need to utilize the most closure in order to “fill in the gaps” and imagine what happens in the story. As I add more panels, the gutters get smaller and smaller because the new panels add the missing/new information. At the end, the readers realize that their closure or their version of the comic was totally misleading, showing that a story, or comic, depends largely on the closure employed by the reader.
Furthermore, the material I used to make the comic panels — post-its — also serve to convey how fickle but intuitive closure is when reading comics. Post-its by design are meant to be moved around and pasted anywhere; thus just as easy the reader adds the new panels to their version of the story as they keep reading, I mirrored the act while making the comic by re-ranging the post-its on the page to affect the plot. Depending on where I chose to place the post-its or which post-its I chose to add/remove, closure will lead the reader to perceive the story differently. The sequences that explain this effect perfectly are the 3rd strip on page 3 in conjunction with the last strip on page 4. In page 3, the third strip shows Jamal getting cornered in an alleyway, then being captured and stabbed by the monster, and lastly a close-up of a bloody knife is shown. This sequence prompts the reader to believe, through the implementation of closure, that Jamal has been murdered by the monstrous creature. Yet, once the reader gets to the last strip of page 4, they realize that their assumptions were all wrong. The panel with the bloody knife no longer means that Jamal was killed, instead it simply means that the director’s wish of a sharp close-up shot was fulfilled.
Overall, I think that my comic was successful in conveying how intrinsic closure is to comics and how such a mechanism works to help the reader understand and perceive the story. Although I would have liked to alter reader autonomy a bit more by making the comic readable from different directions, I am mostly satisfied with the final product. I definitely feel like a different structure would have made the effect of dismantling the reader’s closure more impactful, but I think that the structure I chose conveys my point in a simpler manner, which is valuable in order to reach a wider audience.
©2020 Zeyris Rodoli Contreras