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Mcloud Style Analysis of Fun Home
By Trevor Valescu | February 18, 2017
McCloud refers to the gutters as the space in between panels where “human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (McCloud 66.) This is such a profound concept to me and definitely deepened both my understanding and appreciation for comic books. It had never occurred to me how much happens between those panels and how much is left to the reader/viewer’s imagination. It’s rather indulgent and I love it! And the whole idea that our brains automatically create closure out of things that don’t have closure– that we don’t actually see a character being killed, but see a gun and “hear” a gunshot via a word bubble, yet we have a vivid mental image of how he was killed– it’s astonishing!
For instance, let’s turn attention to the three panels on page 34. Though the gutter between the top two images is not very big, I, as the reader/viewer, can deduce that these scenes did not occur one right after the other. The first pictures the mother and her children, doing chores, etc. The next pictures the author sitting in her bed reading The Addams Family. However, between the second and third panel, I see a much shorter lapse of time because, even though it’s from a different angle, the author is still sitting in her bed, reading the same book. Could this scene actually have occurred on a different night? I’m sure it could have. But the similarity between the two frames leads me to believe that they happened very close together. As McCloud points out in chapter 4, gutters can have an impact on time; they can make scenes seem like they happened close together or far apart depending on the size of the gutter. The physical size frames makes a difference, too– the bigger the frame, the more time it will require to view everything in it. He also makes a big deal about words. It takes much more time to view a frame if there are words as opposed to just an image. They have the same setting and use mostly the same characters. The biggest difference is that there are words in the second one. Even though it may only take one second longer for me to view the dialogue, the truth is that it will take longer because it’s there.
Another aspect of time that McCloud focuses on is transitions. I noticed that this graphic novel utilizes a lot of subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene transitions. The screenshot above is a great example of a subject-to-subject transition. It is staying within the same topic and idea; in fact, the appearance of these frames is very similar. However, the subject/focus has shifted from the family just hanging out in the cemetery to the author asking if she can get in the casket hole; this is aided even further by the fact that she speaks in this frame. Scene-to-scene transitions are seen all over this graphic novel. Page 27 in Fun Home goes from scene to scene in every frame. This requires a lot of reader involvement because it’s not moment to moment; the reader/viewer has to think about it (McCloud 71.) For this reason, the narration is incredibly helpful because it fills in the gaps and helps the frames seem much more congruent. This leads me to the topic of word-image relationships. I never realized how complex
this relationship is, but McCloud has seven categories for it! The type that describes this graphic novel in its entirety is inter-dependent, which McCloud notes as the most common type (McCloud 155.) on page 31 from Fun Home. If you gave me the images with no words, I would be completely lost. If you gave me the words with no images, I would be completely lost. Both are equally important in this graphic novel and support each other to convey meaning to the reader/viewer. What is interesting about it is that much of its word messages are done through narration as opposed to dialogue. Fun Home used its narration to tell the story.
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