I really wanna talk about comics, but in the abstract.
I don’t think we (consumers of comics) give enough credit to the power of that little gutter between panels. I mean, so much happens there. oceans of time represented by a tiny space, practically just a sliver of emptiness. there is so much power in the shape and structure of what is functionally a very simple visual tool (empty space = time passing visually). and it’s so amazingly powerful.
Scott McCloud does an amazing job of explaining this in Understanding Comics (one of my favorite books of all time, highly recommend reading it) and I’m not going to just re-hash what he says but this one page sums it up nicely:
I’m just fascinated with the fact that the human mind is so story-based that we’re able to take two static images and just make up the stuff in between. our brains are like “ah yes, I know what to put there” and then does it seamlessly. no active thought, just passive function. the sheer power of the human mind and imagination is staggering sometimes.
especially because this ability is born out of how our visual system functions (fun fact: our eyes are actually super bad at seeing, our brains just fill in for them, look up the fovea). the fact that humans 1. developed the mental capacity to function in a visual world despite our own biological constraints and that we 2. then created an art form that is implicitly founded in those same mental gymnastics, taking advantage of the very same visual leaps, is SO FUCKING COOL!