ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that by seeing the potential in panels, readers can learn to locate and articulate emancipatory practices that extend far beyond the pages, allowing them to play with subjective possibilities and locate unrealized prospects within seemingly fixed contemporary discourses. In a short essay entitled “Of Other Spaces,” which has spurred a large amount of scholarly debate, Michel Foucault introduces concept of heterotopias as sites that are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”. In Alan Moore’s meticulous plans for graphic novel, he describes the final image: Now we have closed in so tight we can just see the silver-white ripples pattern spreading out across inky blackness, more an abstract design than anything else. The chapter considers how filling in the spaces between panels left by artists and writers can allow us to see alternatives to the present. In this way, the story works similarly to the spaces in films that imply their existence, but do not reveal themselves on screen.
