How to Read a Comic: Panels, Gutters and the Space Between

Reading a comic feels effortless once you are used to it, but it asks more of the reader than almost any other medium. You have to read words and pictures together, follow a path across the page, and fill in what happens between the pictures yourself.

Comics creators and scholars have spent decades describing how this works. The best-known account is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, a book about comics written as a comic. Its ideas, and a few basic conventions, make any comic easier to read and more rewarding.

A book that explained the medium

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art was published in 1993. Running to 215 pages, it is itself a comic, with McCloud drawing himself as a guide who talks the reader through the history and mechanics of the form. It won several awards in 1994, including Harvey Awards and the Eisner Award for best comics-related book.

Together with Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, it is considered one of the foundations of comics studies in English. McCloud's central claim is that comics are defined by sequences of images placed together on purpose, rather than by any particular subject or audience.

The basic parts

A comic page is made of panels, the boxes that each hold a moment. The spaces between them are called gutters. Words appear in speech balloons, which show what characters say, thought balloons for what they think, and captions, usually boxed, for narration. Sound effects are often drawn as part of the picture.

Some of these conventions are old. The speech balloon and the stars that show pain were popularised by The Katzenjammer Kids, a newspaper strip that began in 1897; our history of the comic strip tells the story.

Reading order

In Western comics, panels are read left to right and top to bottom, like a page of text. Within a panel, balloons are usually read in the same order, and artists place them so that the first speaker is on the left or higher up. Good layouts guide the eye so smoothly that readers rarely notice they are following a path.

Japanese manga are traditionally read the other way, right to left and top to bottom, starting from what a Western reader would think of as the back of the book. We look at that and other differences in manga vs Western comics.

Closure: the reader's part

McCloud's most influential idea is closure: the work readers do to fill the gaps between panels. A comic shows a man raising an axe in one panel and a scream over a city skyline in the next; the reader supplies everything in between. Nothing is drawn, yet everyone knows what happened.

That is why comics can feel so immersive. The reader is not just watching events unfold, as in a film, but actively assembling them from fragments. Much of a comic's effect, including suspense, humour and shock, happens in the gutter rather than in the panels.

Masks and backgrounds

McCloud also noticed a common pattern: simply drawn characters placed against detailed, realistic backgrounds. He argued that a simple, cartoonish face works like a mask, easy for readers to identify with, while a detailed setting makes the world feel solid and real.

He arranged comic art styles on what he called the Big Triangle, between realistic, iconic and abstract images, and argued that Western readers are especially drawn to iconic images. Whether or not every reader agrees, looking at where a comic sits on that triangle is a useful way to understand its effect.

Timing on the page

In comics, space is time. A wide panel can make a moment feel longer; a sequence of small panels can speed action up; a page turn can hide a surprise. Creators of four-panel strips learn to place the punchline in the last panel for exactly this reason, as our guide to sequencing a four-panel comic explains.

Silence works too. A panel with no words, or the same scene repeated with small changes, slows the reader down and draws attention to what is changing. Many of the most powerful moments in comics are wordless.

Reading better

The best way to improve as a comics reader is to slow down. Look at a page as a whole before reading it, notice how panels are sized and arranged, and ask what the artist chose not to show. Rereading a favourite comic with these ideas in mind often reveals techniques that worked on you the first time without being noticed. It also helps to read the same page twice: once for the story, and once just for the pictures, ignoring the words.

McCloud followed Understanding Comics with Reinventing Comics in 2000 and Making Comics in 2006, which turn the same ideas towards creating comics, for readers who want to try making their own.