Reading response

When reading McCloud’s Time, my attention was drawn to the way time was “cut into panels.” Each division looks simple, yet it forces me to pause, skip, or fill in a moment that isn’t actually shown. Time doesn’t move in a straight line here. Instead, I find myself searching for the rhythm inside the panels. Some sequences pass with just a glance, while others make me stay for a few extra seconds. Looking at these pages, I start to notice that I’m actually “arranging” time while I read.

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Another chapter kept me watching how I read words and images together. Sometimes I understand everything just from the picture. Sometimes I only look at the text. Sometimes the two mix in a way that makes me hesitate for a moment. When the drawings are full of movement and expression, I often look at the image first, then go back to the words, as if checking whether they are talking about the same thing. Reading becomes a kind of back-and-forth motion, rather than sliding through sentences. Many meanings aren’t directly written or drawn; they appear in the space between the two. As I read, I keep stopping to notice what my mind deletes, and what it invents.

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This made me think about how I read One Piece in my own life. Whenever a big battle happens, I tend to read the action panels almost too quickly, like I’m being pulled through them. But when there’s a small emotional moment—a close-up of a character’s face, a silent reaction shot, or a panel with nothing but the sky—I slow down without realizing it. Sometimes I even flip back a page to check something I felt rather than saw. Those scenes don’t “tell” me anything, but they change the pace inside my head.

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Reading the Iterate chapter, my thoughts settled on the idea of “repeated trying.” The book describes the creative process in a very straightforward way: ideas get overturned, revised, overturned again, then picked up once more. These back-and-forth movements remind me of the moments in my own work when things suddenly stall, shift direction, or get restarted from scratch. They often look like failures, but in the language of the chapter, they become a natural part of making something.