Scale is an important graphic element for artists to use within their comic or graphic novel. According to Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, with the use of scaling techniques an artist can create an image that has appeal, movement, depth, illusion or tension, as explained in their book, Graphic Design: The New Basics. Additionally, scaling elements often enhances the understanding or emphasizes an important detail of the story. Scale is thought of as either being objective or subjective. An objective scale refers to the correlating measurement between the replica/model and the real-life measurement it represents. Whereas the subjective scale concerns the impressions one has of an object’s size. Such as an object’s appearance within a design may be larger in relationship to our own bodies, as Lupton and Phillips stated. The use of scale therefore makes an image interesting and active. 

page 53 of Mimi Pond’s graphic novel, Over Easy (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)

Over Easy, by Mimi Pond is a coming of age graphic novel about a college senior that looses her financial aid to cover her last year. She goes to work in a 1970’s California diner. In this story, Pond tells about the day-to-day activities within the diner, the workers and customers. On page 53, Pond uses scaling to emphasize the mountain of dishes that a tired waitress faces after a long day on her feet with an aching body. In the top right frame of this page the scale is appropriate to the size of the object. The waitress is portrayed lifting normal size dishes with the correct appearance to her body size illustrating the objective scale element. However, in the bottom frame of this page, Pond uses a subjective scale by over exaggerating the size of the pots and pans in relationship to the waitress’s head making them larger than actual size pots. The way Pond drew the pots in relationship to the waitress’s head is also an example of relative scale. The pots and pans are much larger than the waitress’s head emphasizing the task of washing a large, messy pile at the end of a long shift. Within in this frame, we can also see the contrast of scale as the larger pots are in the front that seems to create the wall of work to be done. In contrast the smaller dishes are hanging up on the hooks receding into the background representing the goal of finished work. The contrasting sizes of these pots create a tension between the work to be done and the goal of finishing the task. The contrast in pot sizes also adds to the feeling of depth and movement because we can see the dishwashing in front of the waitress’s worn-out face and the hooks of the clean pots behind – placing us into the scene knowing that the goal is to turn around and walk to the back of the room to hang the pots.