Triple the Tree Trivia

A very interesting perspective on my own cartoons as I had somehow missed this little gem despite numerous readings over many years of both Scott McCloud and Art Spiegelman’s work. Recently read a piece in The New Yorker magazine on a new biography of Ernie Bushmiller (the creator of Nancy) written by the cartoonist Bill Griffith (the creator of Zippy the Pinhead). Reviewers Mouly & Bormes write the following observation:

For modern-day cartoonists, Bushmiller’s “Nancy” has long represented the essence of the distillation inherent in comics. As Scott McCloud related in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, “Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be ‘some rocks.’ Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate ‘some rocks’ but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of ‘some rocks.’ ”

I’ve long assumed my penchant for always drawing these hallmark black spruce trees (and also to some extent bubbles and nuggets) in threes was based on a subconscious - and as it turns out, erroneous - misremembering of the phrase the “rule of thirds” as the "rule of threes.” The funny little growths have always been primarily a quick technique to establish either a midground or background, so as to enhance depth on the picture plane. They also serve as a simple, bold and graphic way to add some spot black for contrast – as a side-note I still employ the same twig pruned from a tree outside the drawing studio for a drawing class taken over thirty years ago to fittingly draw said trees. As evidenced by any cursory examination of any one of my omnipresent sketchbooks, this definitely plays out across so many of my panels… I could have trolled across any number of them, but limited these posted samples from just flipping through the current one, and didn’t even bother to start sampling finished/published panels in the archives.

Really it’s like extending the rule of threes into the realm of visual art, as it’s traditionally more of a storytelling trope (“three is the smallest number required to create then diverge from a pattern”), and also used for emphasizing political points in speechwriting and for comedy. Not that I have ever put much stock in such aesthetic woo, as they tend to more prove a point of confirmation bias than any legitimate theory, such as the myth of the Golden Ratio. Still an interesting exercise, and there is a kernel of practicality, since, to quote my wife, humans are instinctively wired to look for symmetry, and offsetting such a tendency towards basic pattern recognition is a way to create a more visually interesting composition.