We tend to do this seemingly without thought we know Nancy and her teacher are in a classroom even as most of the classroom remains invisible to us. Even if we only see Nancy at her desk in three panels and her teacher’s upper body in one panel, along with the aforementioned floor, wall, and window, we “see” that these four fragments represent a larger classroom that contains more desks, students, floor, walls, and window. Second, readers of the comic read the strip as a whole and understand that the four strips together represent a classroom. The third and fourth panels draw a rectangle around a smaller space-two thirds of Nancy’s desktop, her upper body, and part of the wall behind her. First, each panel delineates an exact space-panel one in the above strip represents the space that holds Nancy and her desk, a small section of the floor, a part of the wall, and a small bit of window. The rectangular panels of Nancy can be considered as “representations of space” in two ways. Comics scholar Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, in her essay “Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout” has noted that comics “may be representations of space and spaces of representation simultaneously.” Poochie’s invisibility exemplifies this point. There’s more than meets the eye going on with this joke.
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