Manga Study Guide: Barefoot Gen/Gutter

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Gutter
Gutters are the spaces between the borders of the panel, It is also defined as a closure. In comic books the gutter is usually white, but not all the time. The artist has taken leeway on certain pages and mixes the panels together in a seamless set of images for greater impact. The gutter is the thing that separates the images. Without the gutter the reader would have a hard time following along and the transitions between each image and would get very confused with what is happening at the time. the term gutter is referring to the space between the borders of the panels in the comic book(manga). It is called this because it looks like the gutter of a house with its two parallel lines. This space is very important as it separates the panels and lets the reader know that we are going from one scene to the next and makes it easy to follow a long with the comic strip and not get lost between panels.