Blood in the Gutter

Chapter 3 of Scott McCLoud's Understanding Comics explains the idea of closure - the readers capability of creating a complete story from a series of parts. I found that like chapter 1, McCloud points out things that anyone can relate to but one doesnt usually think about. For example, we only KNOW things that we can absorb through our 5 senses. He visualizes this by making everything out of the characters field of vision disappear. People have come to assume that everything we know about exists even if we havent seen it ourselves. This is the value of the gutter - we are forced to imagine what happens between the images but people often make the same interpretations because of the universality of comics. I have never thought about the importance of the space between the panels, but thanks to this chapter I have come to realize it can be more important than the panels themselves.