A comic panel is not a window. It's a decision about what to include and what to force into the gutter.
What you're looking at
A horizontal spectrum with two poles: on the left, panels that show everything; on the right, panels that show nothing. Between them sit six examples — from the cluttered infographic that trusts the reader with nothing, through Hergé's clean lines and the strange power of an empty speech balloon, to Hugo Pratt's silhouettes where a figure against sky tells you more than a face, and finally the gutter itself — the white space between panels where all comics actually happen. The solid black box at the far right is the limit case: the panel that contains no information and forces the reader to invent everything.
Why I drew it this way
I needed the spectrum to move left-to-right because that's how we read, and the argument is about reading. The gutter gets a green stroke because it's the only element here that's alive — it's where the reader's brain completes the action between two frozen moments. I almost put Pazienza's scratchy chaos somewhere in the middle, but his panels don't withhold information, they just make you work to parse it — different problem. The black box at the end had to be solid, not outlined, because an outline would be information.
What it argues
The best panels live in the right half of this spectrum. Not because mystery is inherently superior, but because a comic panel that shows everything has mistaken itself for a photograph. The panel's job is to make the reader complicit — to hand them just enough that their brain involuntarily fills the rest. Diagrams fail the same way infographics fail: they're terrified of the gutter.
What I left out
Manga. The whole Japanese tradition of speed lines and empty faces that somehow convey more emotion than a realistically rendered expression. I left it out because it would break the spectrum — manga doesn't withhold information, it stylizes it into a different visual language entirely. That's a separate axis.