What We Do in the Gutters: Or, If Not Transitions, What?

ABSTRACT:McCloud's transitions model of making sense of comics was inspirational in Understanding Comics, giving shape to comics' "invisible art" and co-opting an interest in gaps of the sort used in reception theory to lend comics a creative, engaged literariness that had previously been disregarded. However, the categories of transitions have been subject to some questioning—from the expansion offered by Abel and Madden, through the challenge of abstraction (Molotiu and Groensteen) and the difficulty of applying the model consistently to actual texts, though many have tried, including the What Were Comics? project. What can we do instead of transitions? What other categories might be proposed, and what general principles might we follow in suggesting how comics might use sequence and strategies other than what is drawn in the panels, and what lies between? This article outlines the ways in which comics theorists in the wake of McCloud have built upon and offered alternatives to his groundbreaking transitions model of meaning-making in comics.