Closure (and other things)

I’m about halfway through Understanding Comics, but I’ve already come across some interesting ideas, one of which I felt had a connection to House of Leaves. In Chapter 3, McCloud discusses closure, which is basically the reader filling in textual gaps, such as imagining what happens in between panels or even seeing something as simple at this :o) as a face. I think that closure also applies to House of Leaves. One part in particular which struck me was the section on Holloway’s tape where most of the words had empty brackets in them where missing letters should be. Without closure, in this case the reader literally filling in those blanks, this section would have been completely unreadable.

Another thing that struck me was McCloud’s discussion of the way comics use icons. On pages 36-37, he talks about how realism in the style of drawing can make comics harder to read. However, when the art is more iconic, “you [the reader] give me life by ‘filling up’ this very iconic (cartoony) form. Who I am is irrelevant. I’m just a little piece of you. But if who I am matters less, maybe what I say will matter more” (McCloud 37). It seems that comics as a medium, because of their openness and their use of icons really fit into a “reader-as-author” model.