comics; closure at work

In Scott McCloud's book, Understanding comics, McCloud brings up the idea of closure. McCloud defines closure as "This phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole." We can take fragmented dots of half-tone prints and observe a picture from it. If you look carefully at newspapers or certain types of print, you will notice that the images we see are made of clusters of dots. We can perceive them as a whole because of the proximity of these clusters that creates an illusion of the image.


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We can perceive a whole person standing even though the frame is cut off, we sense time and space by moving through panels in a comic book with fragmented scenes. When reading a comic, we wouldn't say "This is the upperhalf of a body with no legs." Through closure, we assume that the real person is there and move on with the story.



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We can even sense time and space within the different frames of comics. The panels run linearly with fragmented captures of different scenes. Without closure, a comic would just be a bunch of illustrations of separate events without a story, pictures would be just a dot, and a lot of thigns wouldn't make sense.