Ha – that’s a great observation! I certainly didn’t feel any compulsion to put in a superhero, and they don’t show up in my other comics. What role does this figure play in your argument? Is it legal to produce a comic in the United States that does not have a superhero lurking in it somewhere? In your case, you include your adolescent superhero character, Lockerman. The most avant-garde or independent comics producers sooner or later find ways to insert superheroes into their work if for no other reason to create a contrast with what their comics are doing differently.

That cue, along with the fact that each picture has some bit of the trunk in it make it clear that these animals he is smelling all were at this same spot but at earlier times – and not all at once. Definitely their curviness indicates something different than straight tails would. I thought of an exploded view of overlapping panels – again, fitting more space into it than is there – and that they would all emanate from the trunk of the tree using curvy balloon tails – which I think can be read as meaning smell or back in time (cue “Wayne’s World”!). I may not be able to draw smell, but I can visually represent the concept of layering. The dog has access to layers of experience, we could say higher dimensions, in this regard, that we don’t. Whereas I see the trunk, perhaps tracks around it – the dog encounters the tree and “sees” through his highly nuanced sense of smell, everything that passed upon this spot in the last week or so. Can you walk us through your thinking process as you tackled this problem?

This is a classic problem - how to communicate one sense through forms of representation that operate on an entirely different level. One of my favorite passages in Unflattening is on the bottom of p.40 where you try to convey through images alone the information dogs gather from their environment via their sense of smell.

Unflattening comic