Episode 225 - Monday, January 29, 1979

During the Renaissance of Garfield, from roughly August to November of 1979, there were many advances in science, math, philosophy, and art. One of the most monumental advances in Garfield was the development of linear perspective. Linear perspective uses principles of math to realistically portray space and depth in art. Renaissance Jim Davis was largely concerned with drawing realistic scenes, and linear perspective gave him a reliable method to accomplish this realism, which helped make his comic strips all the more captivating!

Comics are necessarily a two-dimensional activity because a newspaper has only height and width. Yet the world around us is three-dimensional because real objects have not only height and width but also depth. So, how do we portray three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane? This is a complicated task, but Renaissance Jim Davis used and perfected linear perspective as a means of depicting three-dimensional depth in comics. To achieve this perspective, Davis would pick a vanishing point on the horizon line.

Then, Jim Davis would create a receding checkerboard of intersecting lines that would converge and disappear at the vanishing point. When executed properly, linear perspective makes far objects appear small and near objects appear big, just as they do in real life.

Perhaps the best way to conceive this is to picture railroad tracks. Imagine that you are standing on railroad tracks, staring at them as they stretch out ahead of you. The two railroad tracks are parallel in real life, but they appear to merge together and disappear at the vanishing point on the horizon. If the train were at the horizon line, it would appear really tiny. If the train were two feet in front of you, the train would appear huge. So, the size of the train differs depending on how far away it is. This sense of dimension is the same thing Renaissance Jim Davis tried to achieve in his comics.

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