Similes are like other things….ahahahaa!

So something has struck me about comics. It’s happened recently with two, Shoe and Doonesbury, shown below. The width of each frame in a strip is limited, so if a character is watching tv, they must be drawn in close proximity to the screen. The artist could choose to take up two frames in order to draw the character at a more natural distance from the tv, but this would limit the dialogue. Usually, it seems the artists scrunch characters and objects close together in order to maximize interaction, to the detriment of how the characters are perceived by readers. But if the readers know that a character wouldn’t be sitting so close to a tv if the strip had more space, then the character’s reputation isn’t hurt that much is it? And who can blame the artist for considering dialogue to be of more importance than accurately representing proximity of objects to characters?