What Happens Between the Panels
You know a comic is a story split into panels, each one showing a different moment. So a six-panel comic shows six moments.
Which leaves a question the panels cannot answer. Your story does not stop at the edge of panel one and start again at the edge of panel two. Something happened in between. You did not draw it, because there is nothing there to draw on: it is a plain white strip.
And yet every reader knows what happened.
The strip has a name
The gap between two panels is called the gutter, and it is not leftover space. It is where the reader works.
Try it on yourself. Panel one: a ball balanced on the edge of a shelf. Panel two: the same ball lying still on the floor with two little shock lines beside it.
Nobody drew the ball falling. There is no ball in mid-air anywhere on the page. But you did not see two unrelated pictures — you saw a ball fall off a shelf, and you probably heard it land.
You made that up. So did everyone else, and they all made up the same thing.
Why this is the best trick you have
Here is what it means for the comic you are drawing.
Your reader is doing half the storytelling, in a space you left empty. They are not sitting there receiving pictures. They are joining them up, and joining them up is the part that makes reading a comic feel like being inside it rather than watching it.
Which gives you a rule that sounds backwards and is not:
Draw the moments on either side of the exciting bit. Do not draw the exciting bit.
Panel one, a character winding up to throw a snowball. Panel two, someone with snow all down their front. The throw you did not draw is funnier than any throw you could have drawn, because your reader built it themselves out of exactly what they find funny.
How far can a gutter stretch?
Every gutter asks the reader to jump. Some jumps are tiny and some are enormous, and choosing the size is most of what laying out a page really is.
- A moment. A hand halfway to a door, then the hand on the handle. Barely a jump at all. Slow, careful, good for tension.
- A whole action. The ball on the shelf, then the ball on the floor. One clean event, invented by the reader.
- A new place. Standing at the school gate, then sitting at a desk. The reader fills in the walk, the corridor, all of it, without noticing they did.
- A long time. A small child holding a puppy, then a grown-up walking an old dog. Years, crossed in one white strip.
The bigger the jump, the more work the reader does, and the more they enjoy it. Right up until the point where they lose the thread — and then they stop reading and start puzzling, which is not the same feeling at all.
Six pairs of panels. For each one, how big a jump is the gutter asking the reader to make? Put each pair in its group.
- A finger touching a light switch, then the room dark
- A mouth opening, then the same mouth mid-shout
- A cat crouched under a table, then the cat on top of the fridge
- A cake going into an oven, then a cake on a plate
- A boy waving at a front door, then the same boy on a beach
- A sapling in an empty field, then a tall tree with a swing on it
Giving the reader a handrail
If two panels leave people confused, the gutter is asking for a jump they cannot make. You have three ways to fix it, and only one of them is drawing more.
Add a panel. Split the jump into two smaller ones. Costs you space, always works.
Add a sound. A CRASH! in the second panel tells the reader what happened in the gap without you drawing a single thing. Sound effects are gutter-fillers, and that is most of what they are for.
Carry a detail across. Put something in both panels that could not be anywhere else: the same odd hat, the same cracked mug, the same red shoes. The reader uses it to tie the two pictures together and the jump stops feeling like a jump.
You want a panel where a character bursts through a door, and it is not working. What does knowing about the gutter suggest you try?
- Draw the burst in far more detail, so the reader cannot miss it
- Draw the moment before and the moment after, and let the gutter hold the burst itself
- Make the panel bigger than the ones around it
- Add a caption underneath explaining that the character burst through the door
Try it on somebody
Draw exactly two panels, on their own, and leave a wide gap between them. Make the jump a big one on purpose.
Then show it to someone without saying a word, and ask them what happened in the middle.
They will tell you a story. It will have details in it you never drew, and it will be theirs. That is not the comic failing to explain itself. That is the comic working exactly the way comics work.