The 21st Comic

I am going to make a pitch for an element that goes too unnoticed in film critique and appreciation: scale.

It took me too a while to even recognize I enjoy a sense of scale in a movie. One of my favorite active directors, Gareth Edwards, uses all different types of scale in his three last films: Monsters, Godzilla (2014), and Rogue One. Each has scenes where characters are standing in their puniness next to awe-inspiring aliens, towering titans, or giant spaceships in low orbit.

Some of my most vividly remembered dreams are when some incomprehensibly giant monster is looming somewhere near my refuge. I usually can’t see whatever ‘it’ is, but I know it represents my complete and utter ruin.

Scale in life

Scaling, it turns out, is actually pretty darn important in many areas of real life. The scales of justice are the foundation of the US court system. Scales lurk across the country in bathrooms as diet-inspiring titans of self-consciousness in your mom’s orbit.

Scaling in business cannot be understated either. No matter how great your idea or product is, if you can’t ‘scale’ production, you’re sunk. Companies rise and fall in visually pleasing aspect ratios with the ability to scale appropriately, or, as it more regularly happens, not.

Images are like this too. If you blow up a picture (the 2nd worst disaster in a dark room the fire department had ever seen) or expand too much, you lose all the detail, and it becomes blurry, unenjoyable, and pointless. Or, if you’re me, that’s how your comics begin.

Delving into my limited array of established NOMAPLEBAR cliches, one of the fun parts for me in drawing a comic is to play with scale. In lieu of actual talent, I would like to play with the tools I can wield without much skill: contrast. Thus, if I want to show someone feeling small, I draw them in comparison to something large.

The other meaning of scale is also relevant to my interests i.e., how much content can I reasonably and reliably put out each week? So far, I am aiming for 2.5—which seems to be doable—-but what if the needed market saturation point is 3.5 or more?

Measuring Up

As I become more confident in my abilities, I think I will be able to scale up appropriately to the needs of what I am attempting. There is certainly no end of possibilities to this concept (and I am actively working on some new ideas…good ones, even!), but the only way for me to find out is to simply try, revise, and try again.

If we get lazy and only try one thing, never looking up or down, then we become like that picture: poorly rendered and incomprehensible.

And who wants that?