Classic and Cliche

Ant-Man getting bigger.

Artistic styles and techniques getting boring and stale. They get overused. When I see one aspect of a work that I consider hackneyed, it makes me suspicious of the rest of the work, and a work greeted with suspicion is doomed. It may be a most amazing story, but if the way it's told feels out of date, it will simply go clunk.

I think it's natural then to try and avoid these cliches and techniques which have grown too familiar. If you can find your own way of solving the problem, it will be much better. The work will not feel like something out of yesteryear.

A failed attempt to show a character getting bigger while avoiding the
cliche of the many silhouettes increasing in scale one after another. 

However, the techniques and language you create must be effective; otherwise, it's simply a waste. Doing things in your own way, a new way, yet a way that is completely unintelligible succeeds in avoiding cliche, but also manages to avoid coherence. Different creators aspire to different levels of coherence, but I think very few actually hope to be misunderstood. There is always the hope that someone out there gets it. This is a message I put in a bottle and threw into the ocean not because I wanted it to disappear into the void but because I believe there is someone to receive it.

In looking for a new way of expressing something, one may come to realize the value of a cliche and understand why and how it got to be a cliche. It's a cliche because it works. In some cases there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

A pretty cool Ant-Man drawing.

It can take a while to figure out that a specific wheel doesn't need inventing. You can beat your head against a wall trying to find an alternate solution, but even if an alternate solution is found, it probably won't be as good as the cliche solution that has been staring right at you but that you've chosen to avoid eye contact with.