Comic #763

It's perfectly fine. Not the first time he's made the joke, but hey, go check it out for yourself and form your own opinion. As for myself, I'd probably add a chair for the old man to sit in and a beard or hat or something to, you know, mark him as an old man, but it's not really a substantial enough edit to warrant a remix.

In other news, remember that extended commentary I did on that one zombie xkcd? Well, I'm going to beat that horse a little more by pointing to this excellent drawing of Gabe and Tycho I saw on gabeart which I stumbled across when rereading older, circa-2006 Penny Arcade posts. See how nicely it's formatted? But that's not why I brought it up.

Now, one of my points (in my rant) was that the action in a flat shot should only take up about 1/3 of the frame. Clearly the "action" takes up 1/2 of the frame - roughly 400 of the 720 centimeters this picture is in length*. Actually, that's more than half. And I like the picture! I must be flagrantly wrong! Or am I?

If we actually consider how much space Gabe and Tycho themselves take up, we see it's only 350x400cm of the 550x720cm of the entire picture, which equates to just over 35% of the frame. The other roughly 15% of the frame is the pigeon. *In aggregate* Gabe and Tycho only took up a little over a third, so I'm not flagrantly wrong, right? Right. No, wait, wrong. WRONG. The bird is integral to the shot and removing it invalidates the piece - at best it looks like Tycho is going to fall over and they both know it (and aren't doing anything about it because it's KRAZY to fall over). Great comedy, guys! You almost deserve a spot in an xkcd comic!

Anyways, this finding convinces me to make an addendum to my original point - if you intend to have only dialogue or only narration (or you want a flat shot devoid of any prose), you can use 1/2 the screen. If you use both, only use 1/3. I'm still convinced 1/3 is the optimal, but then we can't always have the optimal, and this shot works just fine in defiance of my "rule".

Also, for the record this is what that pic was destined to become.

*When opened in GraphicConverter. Your Mileage May Vary.