Explanation [ edit ]

This comic is one of those that is less focused on humour and more focused on a sense of wonder at the world for both Cueball/Randall and the reader.

Cueball discusses how difficult it is to intuitively feel the reality of how vast the things he sees every day and night are - how big the clouds are, and how far away the stars are. Depth perception - seeing things in 3-D rather than as a flat 2-D image - is partly created by having "binocular vision", or two eyes spaced apart. Each eye sees a slightly different angle on a scene, and the brain combines these two views to give a genuinely three-dimensional view of something. 3-D glasses work the same way, by feeding a slightly offset image into each eye. When you look at far away objects, the offset from each eye is undetectable, and so they may look more like flat 2-D images - hence the impression Cueball has of stars being painted onto a dome rather than being extremely large, far away objects at very different distances.

He wonders if he can work around this impression as far as the clouds are concerned... Normally, Cueballs eyes are a few centimetres apart, like everyone elses, and his 3-D perspective is based on that scale. Here, Cueball puts HD webcams on the tops of football uprights, which are 360 feet apart instead of a few centimetres. He uses strong reading glasses to hold up a smartphone, and feeds the far more offset images of the webcam feeds to each eye so that his brain will create a 3-D perspective of the clouds, which would normally be too massive for the offset between two human eyes to grasp their three-dimensional structure in the same way as smaller, closer things.

This technique doesn't give him the view as if he were a giant as in the final panel, but rather as if he were a giant "at the bottom of an abyss" as per the second-last panel, as the clouds are higher than the goalposts on which the cameras are mounted. The final panel is some artistic license to give the reader a real sense of what it feels like for Cueball to carry this out; it shows us that he has finally achieved a more truthful perspective on the size and shapes of the clouds than he had when he started.

The reason for the reversal of the "right camera" and "left camera" panes on the smartphone screen is unclear, this is likely just a mistake.

The title text is a line from the 1969 song "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell; the full chorus runs: "I've looked at clouds from both sides now / From up and down and still somehow / It's cloud illusions I recall / I really don't know clouds at all." Binocular depth perception involves seeing the same object from slightly different angles, from 'both sides', so Randall is taking the song lyric and literalising it. The song itself has a bittersweet tone and relates to how you understand things differently as you mature, but still don't necessarily feel like you understand them at all, so the tone also fits pretty un-ironically into the theme of the comic.

Transcript [ edit ]

[The entire comic is narrated by Cueball, and never spoken by the Cueball shown in the examples. All dialog is shown in rectangular frames overlaid on the comic panels.]

[In the first panel the background shows a cloudy sky in color, with the clouds all running together and appearing as a blue gray smear. Towards the bottom the horizon and the ground appear dark almost black at the very bottom. Two frames with two lines of text are at the top left and right, similar below except the one to the left has four lines and the one to the right only one line.] I've always had trouble with the size of clouds. I know they're huge. I can see their shapes. But I don't really see them as objects on the same scale as trees and buildings. They're a backdrop.

[The next panel is split in three parts. The top part is in a single frame. The middle part is frame-less and only has text - the only narrating not inside one of the frames. Then at the bottom there are two frames overlaid over three small panels in a row]

[In the top part of the 2ns panel stands Cueball on a flat disk inside a hemispherical dome with the front half cut away. The dome is about three times as tall as Cueball. Above the dome there is one frame with text. There is also two labeled arrows pointing to the dome and the disk.] Stars are the same way. Arrow up: Sky Arrow down: Ground

[Text in between the top and the bottom panels:] I know they're scattered through and endless ocean, but my gut insists they're a painting on a domed ceiling.