Gutter
The gutter is the space between panels on a comics page, where the reader's imagination fills in the action that happens between one image and the next.
In depth
The gutter is the blank space separating panels. It looks like nothing, but it carries much of the storytelling. Between a panel of a raised hand and a panel of a fallen glass, the reader imagines the blow. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993) called this process closure.
Wide and narrow
Artists change the gutter to change time: wide gutters suggest pauses, panels that touch suggest continuous action. In webtoons, the long vertical space between images works as a gutter that the reader scrolls through.
Gutters in different traditions
American superhero pages often use regular grids with even gutters, which gives a steady reading rhythm. Manga uses gutters more freely, varying them from panel to panel to slow down an emotional beat or rush through an action scene, and sometimes letting images break across them. Franco-Belgian albums tend toward dense pages with narrow gutters and many panels. Comparing the same kind of scene in each shows how much of a comic's pace lives in the spaces nobody draws.
Where it appears
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. introduced closure as a way to describe the gutter
What it means today
If a comic feels fast or slow without many words, look at its gutters.
