In class, we discussed Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," which is really the seminal work in well, understanding comics.  McCloud discusses just about every, and any aspect of comics that can be conceived, and our discussion on 'gutters' was interesting, as I hadn't read "Understanding Comics" in some ten years.

As an avid comics fan (buff?), I had always been told that Neal Adams was one of the genre-defining comics-book artists of his day (which happened to precede me by some 15 years).  As you can see in the examples to the right, his use of panel arrangement was completely "outside-the-box," to coin a phrase that came up in class.  That is not the interesting part, however.

What is interesting about the two examples presented here is that they do not conform to the most-often-used transition cited by McCloud, the "Action-to-Action."  Instead, these particular panels, and their arrangement, necessitate a "Moment-to-Moment" reading.  This is interesting, because there is no shortage of action in these panels.  And in McCloud's admittedly small sampling of Western comics, "Action-to-Action" panels dominate.

There is an underlying philosophy in the way stories are told, which is probably all the more exacerbated by the comics medium (65% "Action-to-Action!"), and it is the concept of agency.  McCloud touches on this a little bit in his book, but I prefer Lera Boroditsky's thought that Western (particularly American) readers are much more likely to "assign agency" when describing events.  "John hit Bob," as opposed to "Bob was hit by John."  Or "David broke the glass," as opposed to "the glass was broken." This way of constructing narratives and describing events comes out in our visual language as well, and those artists who break free of that paradigm (like Neal Adams) are to be commended.