Confronting the whiteness: Blankness, loss and visual disintegration in graphic narratives

Whiteness and blank spaces in sequential art are a key component of the form. Whereas the interstitial white of the page outside the panels – or even behind them – has been rigorously analysed by comics theorists (Groensteen et al.), the blank panel and the creeping whiteness it implies are often overlooked, references to them frequently made merely in passing. Contextualizing the blank panel within the field of visual culture studies, whose task – as W. J. T. Mitchell asserts – is to interrogate the manner in which ‘[v]ision itself is a cultural construction’, this article will look at a number of diverse sequential artworks, focusing on instances in which the image/text disintegrates into the very whiteness of the page, withholding all apparent visual stimuli. This article will propose a connection between loss and these telling instances in which sequential art – a strongly visual medium– purposefully ceases to represent or, even, represents through representational voids: white spaces and blank panels. The remit of this article, far from being to provide a definitive answer to the questions the very presence of the blank panel raises, is to humbly begin a much-postponed dialogue on this issue.