BIG HANDS & little geezers (rule #2)

When I handed out my 'rule #1' yesterday I heard a murmur of discontent go around. Hey, it was my gift to you. If you have no use for it, put it at the back of the cupboard. Just remember to serve the drinks out of it whenever I'm visiting.

The matter was briefly mentioned on the Comics Journal forum where one Ben Towie noted that all I meant was that your choices should not be arbitrary. The next guy felt that much was to be lost by making the reader an observer rather than a participant. Well, if you want your reader to identify with either a woman who is about to be murdered, or her murderer, then obviously you need to stick with the 'pictorial language of melodrama' and have nothing to do with my antidote*. The same writer also appears to think I'm arguing for comics as an autonomous artform (i.e. which therefore owes nothing to cinema). Where did you get that one? I don't have any use for the idea of comics as an art form let alone an autonomous one (I'll explain this statement further down the track). I was just arguing for good taste.

Now, today I'm talking about SCALE. That's right, scale. When I arrived in Manhattan in June 2003 for the MOCCA show, the building around the corner from the hotel in which I was staying had a huge poster for the Hulk movie on the side of it. I mean a colossal building-sized image of the Hulk, and an image that was perfectly idiomatic, though I don't know whom we should credit for it or whether it was made by anyone close to the comics biz. I went out the next day to get a photo but it was gone. Look at this other building and just try to conjure it in your head. It was a wonderful feeling looking up at it, because I have always thought of New York as belonging to Stan Lee, while at the same time knowing that's not quite right. Here I was in the big strange far away foreign city, and my childhood pal was on the side of a building welcoming me.
It's a perfect scaling up (I used this term wrongly a few days back... let's differentiate between scaling up and blowing up, as in enlarging) of a classic Kirby-model Hulk. By Kirby I mean the big-hand-reaching-toward-the-reader formula. The classic style of this kind of image requires that the hand, in extremely exaggerated forshortening, cross behind or even break the line of the frame. It's an expanding frame of infinite possibility. It's like a recurring fraction producing infinitesmal subdivisions. It didn't even surprise me to see fingerprints on his mighty hands.
I paid my own homage to the icon of the big hand in this full page from a 1990 Eyeball KId, (art by Ed Hillyer), reprinted recently in Italy. The guy on the ground is saying "Look out! IT's Hermes, and he's got the BIG GLOVE! (that's the plug by which I justify spending today's time here-see Italy in the sidebar, volume 4))

In contrast, Ivan Brunetti was interviewed by the Comics Journal last year and in there he said something to the effect that for his characters to continue being real to him, they must live out their existences on the same small scale, with little variation. I don't still have the issue, so this is from memory, and I'm spinning it off into my own words. It's as though they are actually living inside these tiny boxes that form the frames, never touching or reaching beyond the delimited rectangle, for to do so would be to break their fragile contract with the world.

To summarize:
CAMPBELL's RULE #2:
The frame ain't random either.

****

p.s. *speaking of antidotes, this is the spider that tried to eat my pal Best a few days ago. The poor bloke's still suffering.