Understanding "Understanding Comics" (see what I did there?)

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud presents what one would think is comic book writing for dummies. What Scott McCloud is actually presenting is a dive board lesson into not just making comics, but fully grasping them.

McCloud talks a great deal about a lot of interesting topics, and boy does he analyze them. Such topics include self insertion of the reader, cartoonism vs. realism, and how icons make stories memorable. One of the bigger topics McCloud touches on is time, and how it affects not only the world inside the comics, but the world outside as well. 

Time is a lot of things. It's relative, a human construct, and most importantly: it moves. Time is constantly in motion, there's no stopping it. Even moving your eyes from panel to panel when reading a comic strip takes up time. Comic artists play on this by splitting up scenes using the panel's frames and "gutters". Gutters are the empty space in between panels, where the reader mentally fills in the gap of what has happened from panel one to panel two. To me, gutters are part of what passes time in the comic world. They're the split seconds between Captain America punching Red Skull in the face from Red Skull falling to the ground from the devastating blow.

The writing that appears in comics is also a huge component of time. It literally takes time to read words and decode what they mean in our heads. While we might not think of reading as decoding, that's how our brain sees it. Each movement of the eye to read the next word, and the next word, and the next word of a sentence takes up time. Speech bubbles in comic books obviously represent speech in real life. It takes time to talk to people, it takes time for a villain in a movie to say his monologue, and it take time for your grandmother to tell you the stories of her younger life. Comics realize this, and use writing to either slow down or pick up the pace. Panels with bigger walls of text take more time to read, meaning that the time it takes a person to read that panel, is usually the time it would take that character to say what they've said if they were real. Panels with little bits of text, or no text at all, move much faster. 

My favorite example McCloud used of time affecting comics is this:

It seems like all these speech bubbles are happening at the same time, right? Wrong! This is a sequence read left to right. It takes time for each character to say their "lines". It even takes time for Uncle Henry's camera to go off. Time is essential to comics and graphic narratives as it is essential to real life. Time affects characters, just as it affects us.