Reading Comics: A Primer

A friend of mine once confessed that she has never read a comic. I suggested that she was missing out, but then it occurred to me that a lot of people probably don’t read comics. For one reason or another they just have never picked up a comic. They may have skimmed through the newspapers funnies, but never sat down and read an issue or graphic novel. One thing that might have kept them away, other things being equal, is that they just simply don’t know how to read a comic. Comics aren’t like typical literature, where you read the story and mentally picture what is going on. Rather, comics as sequential art provide everything that’s going on through the panels—the sound, the action, the characters, etc. So I figured I could provide some help in how to read a comic.

First, two terms: panel and gutter. The panel(s), typically just a rectangle, is where the action occurs at a time (or lapse of time). The gutter is the space dividing the panels. If I have a page with two panels, one on top and one on the bottom with the gutter dividing the two, the action in the top panel precedes the action in the bottom. Scott McCloud explained that knowing what’s going on in the gutter is the fundamental thing needed in order to understand reading comics. He says that the shit between panel to panel is like a game of peek-a-boo where you see the parent (panel one), the parent is hidden (the gutter), and the parent re-appears (panel two). Upon development we recognize that although we don’t see the parent, we still know s/he is there. Likewise, the gutter serves as a time lapse between one action and another.

A panel page (a page that consists of a minimum of two panels) reads left to right, top to down. Let’s take a look at an example (Chew no.1, pg. 7):





Here we start (1) at the top moving downward to (2) then to the right (3) and so on till (5). Lettering, thought/chat bubbles, occurs in the same way—left to right, top to bottom. Dialogue on the top or left always has priority, and because comics have to somehow give a sense of time, also come before the other dialogue. (Side note: Bubbles that seem to drift from outside the panel--like in (4)--come from outside the panel, in the same way when watching a movie and a character behind the camera is speaking.)

I hope this helps some of you, and expect more to come. Feel free to leave any questions you may have on reading comics.

-Ignipotens