Page - 160 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

160 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one ver- bal and one visual, register temporality spatially […]. Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn’t blend the visual and the verbal — or use one simply to illustrate the other — but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning. (Chute 2008: 452) This back-and-forth between images and text is present not just over the course of a comic, but is often present within a panel. Panels, equivalent to sentences in a novel or other prose text, can be seen as the building block of a comic. In fact, Raphaël Baroni links panels and travel when he writes that “more than in any other narrative medium, comics are designed to promote travel back and forth between the panels and throughout the book” (Baroni 2016: 11). Panels can consist of just an uninterrupted image but more commonly include a speech bubble, thought bubble, or caption. The panel therefore draws together the text and the image, a process in which there can be tension. In addition to words and images, there is a third key component of a given comics page — the space between the panels, called the gutter. As Rifkind writes, “One of the central tenets of comics theory is that comics depend on seriality, juxtaposing framed images across and down pages, between which there are gaps, known as the gutter, into which the reader projects meaning” (Rifkind 2017: 649). The gutter’s most defining feature seems at first to be contradictory: on the one hand, it is a gap, a lack, an intrusion of white and empty space into what is otherwise filled with colors and words. But on the other hand, it creates a dynamism and movement between those very words and images. As comics present us with what happens in panel A and what happens in panel B, both in showing us an image and in giving us text to read, the gutter is the blank space in between, one which the reader has to contend with: she has to decide what happened between panel A and panel B in order to get from one to the other. Most of the time, this happens automatically. This process, in which the reader is presented with fragments and then imagines the movement that collects these frag- ments into a story, is called “closure” in comics studies. As Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester write, “the author’s task is to evoke an imagined sequence by creating a visual series (a breakdown), whereas the reader’s task is to translate the given series into a narrative sequence by achieving closure” (Heer/Worcester 2008: n.p.). In his book Die Sprache des Comics (The Language of Comics), however, Ole Frahm sees the meaning of the gutter differently. He argues “dass es bei der Lektüre von Comics gerade nicht darum gehen muss, eine Einheit herzustellen, sondern vielmehr darum, ihre heterogenen Zeichen, Schrift und Bild, in ihrer Besonderheit, in ihrer Materialität zu genießen, die sich in keiner abschließenden Einheit bündeln lässt“9 (Frahm 2010: 32). He goes on to say, “Nur weil die Comics das Begehren nach einer Einheit erzeugen, können sie es zerstreuen”10 (Frahm 2010: 54). What both approaches agree on, then, is that the gutter itself works against unity. Purely on the level of the page structure, then, comics have specific ways to portray memo- ries, such as in Glidden’s graphic memoir. While drawing something always, by necessity, fixes it in space — this is what happened and this is how it physically played out — I argue that the 9 “Reading comics does not have to be about creating unity, but about enjoying its heterogeneous signs, its writing and image, in their materiality, which cannot be subsumed into a final whole.” Author’s translation. 10 “It is only because comics create the desire for unity that they can diffuse it.” Author’s translation.