Size Matters ... Does Proportion? 1 1

[LearnedHand]

I have a sort of pet peeve with out-of-proportion covers!    I'll start this thread with three examples: 

I know this is blasphemy, but let's start with a grail - Suspense #3.  Where is the woman's left leg?  In the position she's in, you should be able to see the back of the woman's left calf or at least her foot.  Worse, the guy outside the pit must be at least 10' tall.  Basic geometry - he is outside the pit and elevated so he is farther way from your vantage point than the guy under him in the pit - and he should appear somewhat smaller.  But he isn't.  He's actually larger than the guy below him in the pit.     

More Fun #66 - where to start?  The Spectre's left thigh is narrower than his wrist.  Much worse - it's an "impossible" cover.  The hangar is supposed to be on the ground.  As such, the Spectre can't possibly be touching the plane that's in the hangar and on the ground without being very bent over.  Do you touch the train on the floor under your Christmas tree by basically extending your arms almost straight out in front of you?  Could you do it by standing upright and putting your arms straight down?  Nope, you can't even touch your knee.  

Last example - All-American Comics #22.  Is the Green Lantern a dwarf?  Or is the villain 12' tall?

 

Share your "impossible" covers! 

 

Edited February 12, 2022 by LearnedHand

[adamstrange]

Alex Schomburg:  hold my beer

[lou_fine]

On 2/11/2022 at 9:44 PM, tth2 said:

It's a man singlehandedly lifting a car! 

Totally agree with you here and the exact reason why I tossed the few copies I did find for this turd of a book straight into the recycle bin.  

[Cat-Man_America]

On 2/11/2022 at 9:24 PM, adamstrange said:

Alex Schomburg:  hold my beer

It's just a matter of perspective. 

Alas, one of the twins left me...  

Spoiler

You shouldn't have handed the robot your beer, he apparently went on a Bender...  

 

 

Edited February 12, 2022 by Cat-Man_America
...more ale!

[Flex Mentallo]

The subjective eye!

The art critic Roger Fry vilified classical Indian art because, he said, all the figures were out of proportion. His ideal comparator was the idealized human form depicted in the sculpture of classical Greece. He viewed their Indian counterparts as primitive. He would be turning over in his grave to learn that the Greeks painted those statues in garish colors. Nor did he consider that the indian aesthetic was based on a subjective interpretation of the immanence of all things, and had nothing at all to do with literal anatomy, or the material world. It's not that the Indian sculptors didn't understand how to depict anatomy, its simply not what they were depicting.

 

Similarly, the 'discovery' of perspective in the High Renaissance obscured the fact that when earlier artists depicted a sort of reverse perspective, this was not accidental - to them, the vanishing point was in the eye of the beholder. To all of these, the depiction of the spiritual was on a higher plane. And what happened next, with Brunelleschi and the 'invention' of mathematical perspective, emphasized the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional plane. Art did not become more 'real', it became more illusory.

 

 

Edited February 12, 2022 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

So if on reflection I haven't made the point clear, while its inarguable that many GA comic artists had a poor grasp of anatomy and perspective, they aimed for effect. As for Suspense #3 lacking the far leg, the same could be said of Leonardo's The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist. The two women are conjoined at the shoulder! The Virgin Mary’s arm seems to be longer than necessary, when in fact it actually transforms into a part of the child Jesus’ body. It's also hard to tell which leg belongs to which woman, and there seems to be an extra leg that belongs to no-one.

 

 

 

 

Edited February 12, 2022 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

Regarding size, the Madonna as depicted in Michelangelo's Pietà would be far larger than life size, apparently owing to the difficulty of depicting a fully-grown man cradled full-length in a woman's lap. Much of Mary's body is concealed by her monumental drapery, and the relationship of the figures appears quite natural. Yet while the Christ figure is approximately 6 feet tall, if she were standing, she would be more than twelve feet tall! A guy called Laszlo Toth didn't quite see that however, when one day in 1972, he attacked the statue with a hammer and chisel, shouting "I am Jesus Christ; I have risen from the dead!" With 15 blows he removed Mary's arm at the elbow, knocked off a chunk of her nose, and chipped one of her eyelids. The statue has since been restored.

 

Edited February 12, 2022 by Flex Mentallo