Wednesday, September 03, 2014

I kinda hate to be that guy...

...particularly when it comes to a comic book by writer Geoff Johns and John Romita Jr. They both seem like decent human beings and hard-working professionals, and I generally respect and like a lot of their output. In the case of JRJR, I think he's one of the best superhero artists working regularly today, and one of the all-time greats of that part of the comics industry.

So it kinda sorta pains me to point this out, but I can't help myself. Check out this page from the latest issue of the pair's generally pretty good run on Superman:
That is not the way the human eye works, as Johns, Romita, the inker, the colorist or the editor could have discovered by laying on their sides and looking at a chair, with or without someone sitting in it.

On the other hand, Superman is Krpyptonian, so maybe his eye works differently than ours do, but I get the feeling this was the creative team shooting for something sort of cinematic, and ending up fucking up something fairly basic.

3 comments:

Sean said...

No kidding? I thought it was a creative way to indicate Clark's momentary disorientation at waking up to find someone sitting in his bedroom watching him while he slept. I know that the eye/brain connection doesn't work like that and that in real life, the image wouldn't be perceived as being sideways. But I just accepted it in the same way that I don't question the in story fact that Superman can fly faster than the speed of sound with no possible real world physics to allow that to happen; I just accept that he does that and move on.

Nacho said...

I don't get it. I thought the mistake was that the other guy should be sideways but the other way around.

Ed Sudoku said...

I think it stands out as wrong not because the eye/brain connection doesn't work that way, but because the sideways image is rotated the wrong direction. If someone lays with the left side of their face on a bed (as Clark's is), then, from his point of view, the ceiling would be on the right, and the floor would be on the left - the opposite of how JRJR drew that panel.