Today in our lectorial we did an activity on ‘relations between parts’ where we wrote a one sentence beginning and end to a story, and then inserted three other sentences that could translate into any sequence of the overall story. This was of course made more arduous by adding in a ‘turning point’ and replacing the first and last to make all 8 of the sentences moveable.

This activity was done in relation to the reading of Scott McCloud’s Blood in the Gutter, a comic style explanation of, as one of the guest speakers Liam Ward explained, the meaning of a shot is shaped by what isn’t in the shot. An explanatory example of this is through the average comic strip; in one panel is a man with a gun pointing at another, and in the next this second man is on the ground presumably dead. We don’t know that he was shot, and who it was that shot him if he was, but the ‘gutters’ in between the panels tell us something must be there because of our experiences. This idea of a shot being created not by what is in it, but by what isn’t in it, is also the idea that the meaning of a shot is shaped by the ‘ideas circulating in society’, and this also links to experience, or society as a whole’s experience, telling us that there must be something in the gutter.