The magic: The man holding the ax actually dropped it on his foot.
(Image Source: Flikr, originally from "Understanding Comics")
During our in-class discussion of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," the composer brought up gutters, the space in between frames of a comic (or newspaper, cartoon or other media).  In a comic, as McCloud states in the image to the right, gutters "play host to the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics."  These gutters are vital, and can serve as more than a space to let the reader's mind wander.  While these gutters are often empty, brave artists in comics and other visual fields have placed notes, drawings, even actions in and across the gutter. This can build on the readers' imaginations and pull them into whatever they may be reading or watching.


The gutter space can also be used to set the audience up for an unexpected turn.  One of my all-time favorite gutter space violations comes from an animated sketch from the TV show Wonder Showzen, a mature-audiences parody of a children's show, which is known for its controversial (and often offensive) dark humor.  In the sketch, a bionically reconstructed drunkard (a parody of the Six Million Dollar Man) is shown running toward the screen in two split frames.  This is practiced broadly in animation, and, as McCloud classifies it, an action-to-action cut, which American viewers readily interpret as a left-to right time progression. 

Na na na na na na na na...



In this case, however, that logical progression is thrown out the window. 

Winobot Knockout
Take that, space-time continuum!

As the man on the left reaches across the gutter space and hits his future self across the head with a bottle, viewers suffer a moment of confusion, resulting in (ideally) a chuckle or two.  While completely disregarding the gutter space like this would not hold water in any serious work, it was perfect for the show's humorous purpose and extremely unusual audience.

Depending on the action that crosses the gutter (not to mention the context, audience and purpose), this approach can be used to credible ends, in comics and in other fields.  Perhaps a boxer throws a punch in one frame and lands it across the gutter space, or a bullet is fired in one frame, passes through a wall (gutter) and hits a target in the next frame.  Bold composers in any area can use gutters to nearly infinite ends, expected or otherwise.
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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.

Trap. The combination of the genres of trance and rap usually through sound mixing and editing, has become a staple of parties and festival shows. They share similar use of synth, heavy base and spoken words to create music. But what interests me out of these is the artwork and how the artwork mimics the mixing of themes between rap and techno much in the same way the music does.

Arguably one of the most recognizable symbols in the Western cultural lexicon, or even that of Eastern cultures, is the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. Popularized in the late 1920s by a series of short films, America’s favorite rodent has come to represent the Walt Disney Studios and the Disney corporation at large.

The above comic by Robert Berry appears in his Ulysses “Seen” adaptation of the James Joyce novel Ulysses.

We watched "The Machine is Us/ing Us" and had an interesting class discussion on whether it was a scholarly work or not. It was not, perhaps, “scholarly”; but it was an argument, and it made me think about the sociology of internet communication.

During our in-class discussion of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," the composer brought up gutters, the space in between frames of a comic (or newspaper, cartoon or other media).  In a comic, as McCloud states in the image to the right, gutters "play host to the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics."  These gutters are vital, and can serve as more than a space to let the reader's mind wander.

When we talked in class about usability and the internet, it sounded like the conclusion as to what makes a usable website is simplicity. Creating a website to serve a very obvious purpose is the key to usability. But even when a site is usable, there are aesthetics that make a website a more enjoyable experience for the user. Color, formatting, and graphic elements can enhance usability by making a website visually appealing.

In Vitaly Friedman's article "10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of," the first item listed is  problematic hidden login links on websites. Friedman uses Backpack as an example because the login link is very small and placed right underneath a block of text that looks like an advertisement, rather than placing the login somewhere else on the page where it can be easily located.

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Of the recent readings for this course, I feel most compelled to comment on the writings of Jakob Nielsen. I had heard of him before, touted as the leading expert of usability. A great deal of the discussion in class was devoted to some apparent contradictions between his ethos and one of his now defunct websites. However, I noticed contradictions on the very page we were asked to look at for class.

Professor John Logie teaches us that comics have a place in academia. He teaches it in Visual Rhetoric. Why not? Comics are visual and they are graphic and they are certainly full of rhetoric. Comics teach us to engage ourselves with the comic we are viewing, on our own time, in our own space. Professor Logie teaches that Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" is an essential book to do just that, understand comics.
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