Abstract :
In recent years, reading scholars have increasingly attended to children’s
responses to picturebook page breaks, reasoning that the inferences young readers
make during the turning of the page are central to understanding how children
construct continuous narratives in semiotically rich texts. In this paper I argue that
comics (including comic books and graphic novels) offer similar gap-filling affordances
as picturebooks, but for older children and adolescent readers. A major site
of meaning-making in comics is the ‘‘gutter’’ between panels. This is where much of
the magic occurs for readers while transacting with the medium. Since the comics
medium is popular with many students and has received increased attention from
teachers, researchers, and curriculum developers during the multimodal and multiliterate
turns of the past decades, I argue that it is vital for educators not only to use
comics in their classrooms, but to focus explicitly on gutters in order to exercise the
medium’s full potential. Pulling from numerous sources, I provide several pedagogical
activities that emphasize gutters as rich sites of constructing meaning.
