In Scott McCloud’s comic book Understanding Comics: Writing and Art the author Scott McCloud introduces the phrase Closure in the first panels of page 92 of the book. As he introduces Closure to us the readers he defines it as a reader’s ability to resolve the events in the space between a comic book or comic strips panels. McCloud on page 92 uses two comic panels that are inside one comic panel as examples for his idea of Closure in comics. The first panel of the two shows a man swinging at another man from behind with an axe, and in the next panel is a skyline of a city at night with a text bubble of a scream coming from the city. McCloud’s idea of Closure is our human ability to fill in what happens in the blank spaces or gutters between the panels. In the example given by McCloud most of readers including me would fill in the gutter with the axeman killing or harming the man he was swinging at. The conclusion that the axeman’s target was the man we see screaming would satisfy the insinuated sequence of events that occur between panel 1 and panel 2 in the gutter even though the results of the first panel are never shown. This is because the aforementioned conclusion is one of the most logical conclusions determinable with the information given to the reader.

In my comic strips, the space for Closure within them is the reader trying to figure out how Comrade John got himself into those situations that always lead to him being late to deliver the packages that he was paid a meagerly ten cents to deliver to a fellow comrade. I don’t force an explanation of how John got into those situations. I left that up to the readers’ imagination and what they believe happened in the gutters of my comic strips.

Work Cited

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: Writing and Art. Harper Perennial, 1994.

As we draw ourselves closer to the twelfth-hour. This five-letter word and its different translations throughout the languages of the world have varying degrees of meaning. To some people, Peace is a loose term thrown about to describe love, religion, and interconnectedness. To others, Peace is a word they have rarely experienced but have longed for greatly. And to a large few peace is merely a word of no meaning a word that enters one ear and exits the other, a word that they have had the luxury of living with throughout their years. Though just a five-letter word Peace has more importance and more meaning to the world today as we find ourselves amongst a worldwide crisis. Today more than ever it’s easy to see all the bad things happening in the world. When the world watched as tensions between the United States and Iran people began to protest for peace. We as humans have a tendency to fight each other whether it is siblings arguing or entire continents divided. We still fight. Some fighting is justified in the grand scheme of things, but some are not. As I see it a majority of the fighting today is pointless and fueled by greed, hatred, and other factors. The greatest enemy to peace is right under our noses. This monster, this beast, the very thing in my eyes that makes people so eager to fight against each other is the idea that one person has to be right and that the other is automatically wrong 

The Sierra Leone Civil War officially started on the twenty-third of March 1991(Britannica). That day a group of armed men and mercenaries calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front or RUF for short commenced guerrilla attacks throughout the backcountry of Sierra Leone. During these attacks, the RUF targeted villages with civilians in order to cause chaos within the nation as millions fled the war and the RUF(Britannica). As these attacks continued the RUF started to take control of Sierra Leone’s diamond resources called blood diamonds in order to fund their war machine which included recruited child soldiers. One if not the most notable being Ishmael Beah(Bey-ah) the author of the book “A Long Way Gone”. In his story, Beah recounts the story of his past and how he lived as a child soldier. Beah wrote about how child soldiers were purposely given drugs and watched movies such as Rambo in order to exhilarate them to get them in the mindset of ruthless soldiers that were invincible to death and destruction(Britannica). This civil war was one of the many in the region causing unrest. Wars in neighboring countries are thought to have influenced the RUF into starting the war(Britannica). The RUF eventually reached Freetown the capital of Sierra Leone which saw foreign intervention from a British force sent to evacuate diplomats from the torn country(Britannica). Later UNAMISL was established by the UN as a peacekeeping mission to end the civil war, reinstate the government, and maintain peace in the region(Britannica).

 work cited:

• https://www.britannica.com/place/Sierra-Leone/Civil-war
• https://www.britannica.com/topic/Revolutionary-United-Front