0:00
/
0:00
Transcript

For the love of Comics Gutters pt. 1

What is a gutter and how much time passes in them?
2

Gutters are the blank space around a comics panel. You aren’t supposed to notice them but they are really important because they are the space where the reader connects what’s going on between one panel and the next. They have to look at the panels and decide what happened in between to make them work as a story.

There’s so much information left out of a comic, its amazing how our brains can just fill in the blanks. One really simple thing is how much time has passed between two panels. It could be 5 minutes or 5 months! It’s up to the reader to figure that out and it’s done in milliseconds.

The character in these comic examples is Night Chef, the cooking raccoon and the graphic novel comes out in October 2025 from Random House Graphic. You can pre-order it here.

Discussion about this video

User's avatar