I thought I’d enjoy some quiet time over the summer break and actually get round to reading through my own (and other) comics! Yay! It’s been a pleasant surprise to go through old work like this.
Anyway one thing that amused me was that fact that our favourite kids’ apartment isn’t actually one apartment, it’s a collection of totally separate 3D scenes. For example; whenever they’re upstairs, they are actually at 150% scale, because I cocked up the initial scene build and had to grow everyone when they went ‘upstairs’! Woopsy. Professional.
Also, there is no actual door apertures to the bathroom, nor the mysterious ‘bedroom 3’ (presumably Karen’s old room, though we’ve never seen it nor referred to it). This means, as these pictures show, that you can’t stand a figure in the hallway and look into the bathroom – because it’s not there, it’s just a flat wall! I’ve hidden this by putting a door and a tall light there (see picture 1 above, from comic #5) to imply there’s an aperture, but when Charlie appears to walk into the bathroom (picture 2 below, from comic #4), she’s really just walking through a blank wall! So I had to render at a very specific angle to hide this faux-pas but to also show Charlie’s bottom. Because … you know … priorities.
“wait … wha …” says Jack. If we’d listened to the whole thing, perhaps he’d have said “wha … you’re walking through a blank wall!”
Anyway there we are. Sometimes it’s faster to fudge things and make terrible imperfections ‘good enough’, than it is to fastidiously rebuild everything perfectly. There is no perfect, only broken, wonderful, good-enough us.
So if you’re feeling not right, not good enough, imperfect … if you feel like you change scale for no reason, like you’re facing a brick wall, like you’re cut off mid-sentence, like you’re only acceptable from the right angle … I see you. In fact, we all see you. We’ve all been there. And it’s okay; if it wasn’t okay, my comics wouldn’t be so popular, would they?
Good things can happen from broken and imperfect origins, that seems to be the meta theme going on in all my comics that I’ve been re-reading this last week, and to be honest, I’m kinda proud that they are that way.
Happy summer, everyone. Even if yours didn’t appear to be as polished as the next dudes’ summer. So what; competition is very definitely not what life’s about. Let’s continue to be the whole, broken, fantastic little nonsensical wonder nuggets we all are 👍
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| ^ Downstairs: handrail at hip height, because that’s where handrails go |
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| ^ Upstairs: handrail at thigh height because EVERYONE IS GIGANTIC AMAZONS UPSTAIRS BECAUSE I AM SO GOOD AT 3D MODELLING ACCURACY LOL 😂 |
