What Is The Mood Of The Explainers By Jules Feiiffer

In the comic “The Explainers” by Jules Feiffer, Feiffer draws emphasis on the lack of defined gutter and contrasts between text and images throughout the panels in order to establish a sense of ambiguous progression in both time and narrator reliability.
Due to the comic having no boarders or lines between each image, the gutter is left somewhat ambiguous, which allows one image to blend itself into the next without a definite passage of time. It is only with the addition of written words that go from past to present tense that context is given to time, showing that the panels take place over a prolonged period of time, rather than a few days or even hours. The comic uses phrases like “used to” and “so after” to signify time lapses that are not otherwise obvious without a defined gutter. Instead, the line-less gutter creates an illusion in which the character changes from Superman to Clark Kent bit by bit as he slowly loses confidence. There are no sharp boarder lines to denote a change in either time or character, so the shift is more subtle and thus not as noticeable to the character.
While the transition from the first to the last picture shows a sharp contrast in how the character presents himself, the shift between the first and second image panel offers a far less obvious difference. Due to the temporal ambiguity purposely left in the comic, the reader is forced to interpret the plot and subsequently create his own gutter placement through closure. With this flexibility, the gutter could potentially span through three image panels in one scene instead of a single, individual image, or none at all depending on how the reader regards it. As a result, the gutter placement becomes an obligation of the reader to determine in order to acquire