Visual stories, like comics and graphic novels, like to challenge their readers a bit. One way they might do so, is by leaving out a key event in the story. Readers see the build-up to an event and the aftermath, and are left to figure out for themselves what the key action in between could have been. This is called a bridging inference.

Besides leaving out the key event, visual stories might even replace the key event with something else: a related but not really informative event. Think of action stars (big flashes!), sound effects (POW!), or even a metaphoric event.

My publication on this topic investigated how readers handle those kind of ‘replacement panels’ and whether they could still make sense of the story this way.