Blankets & Understanding Comics Chapter 3

During one of our first class sessions we discussed the purpose of the frames used on page 52 of Blankets, in which Craig is shown changing from a child to a high school student as he falls through clouds. At least two parts of Craig’s maturing body are in each of the three frames, and therefore Craig’s body must infiltrate what McCloud calls the gutters between the three frames.

While McCloud states that gutters are the locations where reader imagination is supposed to fill in any empty spaces in the narrative, Thompson complicates the traditional use of gutters through allowing his characters to break into them. On page 52, therefore, a reader may mentally fill in whatever events he desires into Craig’s life between the frames, but Craig’s ability to escape the frames adds an additional level of fluidity to the page and to what might have otherwise been an awkward transition from childhood to high school.

I also appreciate Thompson’s use of both moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions within short amounts of space. In chapter 7, for instance, moment-to-moment transitions are used as Raina falls asleep, signifying Craig’s strong attentiveness to Raina’s physical features. Shortly after this, Thompson uses aspect-to-aspect transitions to show a number of features of the landscape, including snowdrifts and leafless trees. The aspect-to-aspect transitions place Raina and Craig within a rather barren landscape, making the moment-to-moment transitions seem even more important through increasing the reader’s sense of Craig’s fascination with Raina.