[HN Gopher] On the bonkers color palette of Garfield comics
___________________________________________________________________
On the bonkers color palette of Garfield comics
Author : zdw
Score : 287 points
Date : 2020-11-23 16:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wondermark.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wondermark.com)
| yellowapple wrote:
| I just watched "07/27/1978" for the 5th time last night, and now
| I can't help but read this article in John Blyth Barrymore's
| voice.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Obligatory, must watch: https://www.youtube.com/user/lasagnacat
| djsumdog wrote:
| YES! There's a great Inside a Mind video where he does a deep
| dive onto Lasagna Cat. In retrospect .. Garfield wasn't that
| great. It wasn't groundbreaking or truly humerus. But you read
| the stuff over at Paws and they talk about it like it was the
| most inspirational comic strip of all time.
|
| Lasagna Cat (specifically the weird 3 hour loop) is an
| exposition of that repetitive format. In a dark and silly way,
| it pokes fun at the hubris of Davis et. al.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Just wanted to say I do prefer the more colourful version of the
| Wondermark comic strip at the end of the article.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Rather offtopic, but isn't RGB a very unsuitable color space for
| communicating with people? HSV seems like a much better
| colorspace for talking about color.
| klodolph wrote:
| HSV isn't really its own colorspace, it's just an RGB
| colorspace that's been twisted around.
|
| If you want to communicate colors with people, I think your
| main choice is to either use color names (e.g. light teal, dark
| red) or Pantone.
| [deleted]
| StavrosK wrote:
| Technically, RGB isn't a color space either, it's a color
| model. sRGB is the color space.
| klodolph wrote:
| Yes, that's why I wrote "an RGB colorspace" rather than
| "the RGB colorspace".
| yoz-y wrote:
| While saturation and brightness (value is probably a weird term
| for most) are explainable and straightforward, even if you
| explain what hue means, I doubt most people would be able to
| intuitively reason about it. I use HSV all the time but I have
| absolutely no idea how a HSV colour would look like, over time
| I have an intuition about RGB though.
|
| Where I was growing up though, most kids would have an
| intuition if you were talking about red, blue, yellow, which
| were the colours we used to paint all the time.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Huh, really? I find it much harder to reason about what 30%
| blue, 20% green, 90% red makes than about what 30% saturated,
| 20% bright green makes.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Ah, if you use the color as a hue then I agree. I was
| thinking about degrees. As in somebody would say: "30%
| saturated, 20% bright color at 127deg hue"
| StavrosK wrote:
| Oh, no, yeah, degrees are completely inscrutable.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| As Joel Spolsky wrote, "[Garfield] jokes ... are about how much
| the cat likes lasagna (and those are the punchlines!)"
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
| bluedino wrote:
| One of the strangest things to me when I was a kid, was reading
| the comics at my aunt's house. They lived in a different town,
| got a different newspaper, and the comics were different.
|
| The big ones like Beetle Bailey, Garfield, Family Circus, they
| were all there. But some of the smaller ones were missing. And
| there were other comics I never heard of.
|
| None of them were the same size or on the same pages. We had
| Peanuts on the front page. They got a tiny version of Hal and
| Lois. But the oddest thing is that some of the comics were in a
| vertical instead of horizontal format. Then my dad explained
| syndication and editors and all that stuff flew right over my 10
| year old head
| gxqoz wrote:
| I started subscribing to the Seattle Times Sunday paper a few
| years ago. Comics section is a nice bonus, although I generally
| don't like their selection. For instance, the top comic is For
| Better or For Worse. Setting aside the fact that I've never
| felt any attachment to this comic, I don't understand why a
| comic that's been in re-runs since 2008 gets top billing.
| gxqoz wrote:
| Oh and the worst part is they use a logo for the strip
| Candorville that has a big ugly QR code in the middle of it.
| anthk wrote:
| I like Beetle Bailey, and I am not even an American, I've just
| liked to roam local cheap stores where I live and they had
| newspapes strips compiled into a comic book, it was cool. There
| was one based on a married couple with tons of typical issues,
| I can't remember it's name.
| phjesusthatguy3 wrote:
| The Lockhorns?
| jkestner wrote:
| Andy Capp? That was the worst, which was probably why my
| paper put it in the classifieds.
| jcstauffer wrote:
| Or Blondie?
| phjesusthatguy3 wrote:
| That's probably more like it. The Lockhorns seem to
| dislike eachother most of the time.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Sally Forth? Luann?
| tclancy wrote:
| Love Is? Pluggers? Mallard Fillmore?
| egypturnash wrote:
| I was always under the impression that the only romantic
| entanglement in Mallard Fillmore's life was "owning the
| libs".
| anthk wrote:
| Yes, Blondie. Thanks.
| Covzire wrote:
| Hagar the Horrible? You want your man to just stay home and
| solve some bugs in the garbage disposal's code, and he goes
| pillaging and plundering. Typical.
| Sunspark wrote:
| Is it.. is it the Family Circus?
| yeldarb wrote:
| I tried to fine-tune Deoldify (a neural net that colorizes old
| photos) to colorize Garfield comics a while back. The results
| after a couple hours of tinkering were promising.
|
| I still think it would be an interesting project to pursue. There
| are millions of black and white comics from centuries of
| newspapers that are only in black & white.
|
| https://twitter.com/braddwyer/status/1135630638374096897?s=2...
| Sunspark wrote:
| The commentary about the intensely saturated RGB colours vs the
| more naturalistic CMYK colouration is an interesting observation
| for me to see. There are a number of graphic novels that I
| considered purchasing but didn't because I wanted them to look
| more like the original comics. Graphic novel reprints published
| during a certain timespan thought it a good idea to go with
| semigloss paper and re-did all the colours to be super-saturated
| and dayglo like someone had visited a highlighter marker factory
| and was excited about the experience.
|
| As an aside, who exactly was the target viewing demographic for
| Garfield? Garfield was never funny for me as a kid. Never.
| subsubzero wrote:
| > Garfield was never funny for me as a kid. Never.
|
| Agree, Although I really liked the Garfield animated show in
| the late 80's/early 90's.
| markrages wrote:
| > As an aside, who exactly was the target viewing demographic
| for Garfield? Garfield was never funny for me as a kid. Never.
|
| Garfield is Jay Leno in comics form. More about good cheer than
| actual humor.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If that "certain timespan" was the eighties then what you are
| seeing is more that they used the _exact same_ colors... which
| were designed to be seen on yellowish newsprint that sucked in
| a ton of ink, instead of bright white glossy paper that all the
| ink sits right on top of.
|
| Over time people mostly quit doing that. Once it became
| reasonably easy and affordable to deal with a multi-layer
| 300dpi (or better, it's always nice to be able to have your
| minor mistakes vanish when it's shrunk to print size) file, and
| for that file to get turned into four CMYK plates, comics
| colors started to look a _lot_ better than when everything had
| to be planned in watercolors over a xerox, then turned into
| those four CMYK plates by hand.
| causality0 wrote:
| On a related note, does anyone know a good way to archive strips
| from GoComics? It's the only source for a huge number of my old
| favorites and I'm afraid that in another decade or two they won't
| exist online at all.
| kzrdude wrote:
| There's nothing bonkers about this palette. To always color
| something in the expected colors is like coloring it in _gray_ ,
| _boring_ , _expected_.
|
| Also, real shades have color and painters know how to paint with
| peachy-colored shadows just fine.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| If you like bonkers comics, you should check out Krazy Kat. The
| main characters are a police dog, a mouse that is a very accurate
| brick thrower, and a cat of indeterminate sexuality which sees
| the bricks as a sign of affection.
|
| The cat is not heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual. It
| changes from strip to strip. Also, it speaks in a verra verra
| raff lengwidge.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| There's a series of _Pogo_ strips where they discover Ignatz's
| brick lying abandoned and wax nostalgic about bygone days:
|
| "This is the brick that made a comics legend! Pyramided it to
| the stars!"
|
| "A _square_ pyramid?"
|
| "Well, it's more _ob_ long..."
| tobr wrote:
| > after every strip he pauses, asks what happened, and then says,
| slowly and calmly, "Why"
|
| Honestly, that's usually my reaction to Garfield as well. The
| strips often seem like they don't have a punch line at all.
| munificent wrote:
| You will love Garfield Minus Garfield:
| https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
| astrocat wrote:
| This is absolutely amazing. Thanks for sharing :)
| nekopa wrote:
| That, is fantastic.
| publicola1990 wrote:
| Every time I hear of Garfield, I sort of end up thinking more of
| Heathcliff.
|
| https://www.literateape.com/blog/brian-sweeney/we-need-to-to...
| akkartik wrote:
| I've somehow passed by a lifetime of incidental Heathcliff
| comics without encountering one with a helmet.
| jdlyga wrote:
| I enjoyed Garfield as a kid. It has definitely run out of ideas
| for a few decades now and is extremely milquetoast. But there are
| some classics. This was my favorite:
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0f/9d/fa/0f9dfab0251ed0356321...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I suspect that newspaper cartoonists who knew that 1/3 of their
| strip might get lopped off, or the panels reshuffled, from paper
| to paper may have a more inherent understanding of the work
| itself as being modular.
|
| Perhaps, but then again you have Bill Watterson.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > I suspect that newspaper cartoonists who knew that 1/3 of their
| strip might get lopped off, or the panels reshuffled, from paper
| to paper may have a more inherent understanding of the work
| itself as being modular.
|
| This was something Bill Watterson hated and eventually Calvin &
| Hobbes got popular enough he dictated that newspapers had to
| print the whole thing or nothing. That's why some papers printed
| it squished down to a smaller size.
|
| It sure seems like he should have taken his work online. No
| format restrictions, publish on your own schedule. He was popular
| enough to blaze a trail for the new generation but he threw it
| away instead. That's his choice but seems like a missed
| opportunity.
|
| FWIW if they printed comics as half page color prints weekly (and
| not just gag strips) I'd subscribe to that. As newspapers were
| dying they seemed to cut back on that sort of thing though.
| interfixus wrote:
| You have to love this HN crowd. Here's Bill Watterson being
| lectured on what he - cartoonwise - threw away and which
| opportunities he missed. More is better. He just never got the
| memo.
| munificent wrote:
| Think of all of the brand value he could have created and the
| engagement maximimized! Foolish Bill Watterson being a
| retired watercolor painter when he could have cornered the
| market on Calvincoin by now if he'd understood the market
| opportunity.
| subsubzero wrote:
| he did corner the market on those stickers where Calvin was
| peeing on either a ford or chevy logo..
| sodapopcan wrote:
| I never realized that he did this! I always noticed how the
| longer colour strips started with a two panel throw-away for
| papers that wouldn't print it. Was that still a thing after he
| demanded the whole thing be printed? If so it's interesting
| that he kept up the two-panel thing after that!
| qndreoi wrote:
| Just two days ago, BC noted that two panels could be thrown
| away on Sunday. https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2020/11/22
| gxqoz wrote:
| Huh, I see that all the time in Wizard of Id and never
| realized the somewhat incongruous first panels were due to
| this.
| agency wrote:
| He got pretty experimental with the format once he had the
| freedom to do so:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/ddU50.jpg
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/02/26
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/12/19
| teraflop wrote:
| Not really -- the format of the Sunday strips became a lot
| looser and more varied after the throwaway panels stopped
| being a thing. Compare, for example, these two Calvin-as-a-
| dinosaur strips, from 1988 and 1994:
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/08/14
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1994/01/30
| webmaven wrote:
| _> FWIW if they printed comics as half page color prints weekly
| (and not just gag strips) I 'd subscribe to that. As newspapers
| were dying they seemed to cut back on that sort of thing
| though._
|
| You might be interested in subscribing to the dead trees
| version of the Funny Times:
|
| https://funnytimes.com/subscribe/
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Taking a comic strip online in 1988 would have not been a smart
| move -- nobody would have been able to read it.
| jefftk wrote:
| Waterson ended Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 1995; slightly
| early for moving online but not by much.
| joshmaker wrote:
| > In 1995, the Pew Research Center did just that, finding
| 14% of U.S. adults with internet access.4 Most were using
| slow, dial-up modem connections--just 2% of internet users
| were comparatively screaming along with an expensive 28.8
| modem.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/02/27/part-1-how-
| t...
| jefftk wrote:
| I can't tell where you think we disagree?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| if 86% of households don't have internet, it's _much_ too
| early for launching a comic strip, not merely slightly.
|
| This sets aside the fact that revenue streams were not
| present for comics on the internet, as monetized webpages
| did not exist yet. He was paid by newspapers directly.
| It's an absurdity to give up 70% distribution and a
| guaranteed paycheck for 14% _maximum_ distribution and no
| income stream at all.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> monetized webpages did not exist yet_
|
| The first banner ad was 1994; By the end of 1995, when he
| would have been deciding to go online, internet
| advertising was definitely a thing people were aware of.
| On the other hand, Waterson hated advertising.
|
| _> 70% distribution ... 14% maximum distribution_
|
| These numbers are not comparable: 70% is the fraction of
| newspapers he was in, but not everyone got a newspaper.
|
| _> It 's an absurdity to give up 70% distribution and a
| guaranteed paycheck for 14% maximum distribution and no
| income stream at all._
|
| He was done with newspapers, so he was giving up that
| guaranteed paycheck regardless. His alternative, which he
| took, was retiring.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Waterson ended Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 1995;
| slightly early for moving online but not by much._
|
| Dilbert was the first syndicated comic online that same
| year. As for whether Waterson could/would/should have done
| the same, why would he if he was ending the strip anyway?
| jefftk wrote:
| Waterson talked about how he was unhappy with the
| constraints of the newspapers; it's possible that he
| would have found webcomics, with essentially no
| restrictions, interesting enough to keep going?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| The "ultra-bright" color palette used for those online strips
| looks to me like the standard one that came with the original
| Paintbrush[1] in Windows 3.11 (and, probably, in other graphic
| tools of that time).
|
| I bet that this palette was chosen around that time, and it
| simply remained in place due to either consistency or lazyness
| (aka "if it's not broke, don't fix it").
|
| [1] https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-
| qimg-2b893e004a57aa11221c4a...
| akx wrote:
| I booted up PCJS's Windows 3.10 image to have a better look.
| See here... https://i.imgur.com/l4WP44R.png
|
| The image uses the CGA color palette (https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_p...) of 16 unique colors
| (`identify -format %k pb.png`), the first 8 columns. The other
| 6 columns are dithered colors.
| einr wrote:
| Close, but no. Windows does not use the CGA/EGA palette
| (unless started in EGA mode, which is a thing that can be
| done)
|
| The Windows 16-color palette is based on pure, fully
| saturated colors (i.e. red is 255/0/0, lime green is 0/255/0,
| cyan is 0/255/255, etc) while the CGA/EGA hardware palette is
| a little bit softer and less saturated, as in your Wikipedia
| link.
|
| It also seems like your screenshot does not represent the
| true 16-color palette that Windows 3.x actually used. I have
| no idea what's going on with PCJS or what manner of weird
| graphics driver it's emulating but this is not what Windows 3
| generally looked like if you had a VGA card. The first row
| does not have the correct color values, and the second row
| should be visibly darker. The difference between the lighter
| and darker blue is very small in your screenshot, for
| instance. This is not correct.
|
| This screenshot shows the true default Windows VGA palette
| (in true color mode, so the rightmost columns are not
| dithered): https://i.imgur.com/YR37uSO.png
|
| EDIT: I had to investigate. Yes, PCJS is doing some kind of
| weird color mangling and does not display the real color
| values. You can see in this screenshot I just took that what
| Windows running in PCJS considers to be pure green is
| actually not that. https://i.imgur.com/SpUJI8x.png
|
| EDIT 2: For the sake of completeness, the following
| screenshot shows Windows 3.0 running in actual EGA mode. This
| was a very rare sight even back in the day since most
| hardware powerful enough to run Windows 3 satisfactorily
| would have had VGA/SVGA. Regardless, it is doable. You can
| see that the titlebar color is very different from the
| default VGA one. The default EGA fonts are also quite
| different and are a rare sight. https://user-
| images.githubusercontent.com/6245486/41811800-6...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Most 386s only had EGA. Windows 3.0 was not normally run in
| VGA.
| akx wrote:
| Huh, you're right. Running Paintbrush in a Windows 3.11
| image in QEMU yields saner colors (such that they do
| actually have 255s in them), but I think there's some gamma
| conversion at play still, and QEMU and PCJS have different
| views on that.
|
| Here's the QEMU image and color palette:
| https://imgur.com/b1XGFB4 / https://gist.github.com/akx/f74
| b840f630fdc10219d9d5211a38c7a
| tyingq wrote:
| Guessing that was to suit 16 color EGA?
| joosters wrote:
| There's a comment in the twitter thread that helps to explain why
| there are multiple color versions of the comics: From the
| Wikipedia page on Paws Inc:
|
| _In 1994, the company purchased all rights to the Garfield comic
| strips from 1978 to 1993 from United Feature Syndicate, although
| United still holds the original black-and-white daily strips and
| original color Sunday strips. The full-color daily strips and
| recolored Sunday strips are copyrighted to Paws as they are
| considered a different product._
|
| So maybe it's down to copyright law that the strips have
| differing colors (and that the coloring is chosen to be
| completely over the top to ensure it can be claimed to be
| different enough from the other versions owned by other
| companies?)
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Sure sounds like derivative works and that infamous JJ 25%
| different Trek & Wars.
|
| https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/04/star-trek-discoverys-vers...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Going full meta, I can easily imagine this being a Star Trek
| episode:
|
| We're presented with an alternate future where Starfleet
| flies blocky and predominantly green ships (instead of the
| usual saucer + nacelles, white/gray with touches of blue, red
| and orange designs), and there's no Federation. In the course
| of the episode, the temporal agents investigating the
| alteration discover that the culprit is a data cache that
| traveled few decades into the past and landed on the lap of a
| particularly entrepreneurial Ferengi, who proceeded to
| register patents and trademarks with relevant planetary
| governments just as crucial technologies and iconic designs
| were about to be created - ensuring his own riches, at the
| expense of the fate of the quadrant.
| 0x10c0fe11ce wrote:
| I'd pay to watch Data clueless dealing with that.
| Brilliant!
| unavoidable wrote:
| I see this kind of argument come up a lot when talking about
| copyrights and patents. This is not how that works.
|
| If someone creates a derivative work (e.g. crazy colors), that
| new person does own the copyright in the new "crazy colors"
| version, but they don't own the copyright to the black and
| white version. However, the new crazy colors version contains
| the rights of both the old and the new author, so that in order
| to publish the crazy color version, they would have to obtain a
| licence to the original version or else be infringing.
|
| In short, the new version has two rights, owned by two
| different people, not one.
| simiones wrote:
| > If someone creates a derivative work (e.g. crazy colors),
| that new person does own the copyright in the new "crazy
| colors" version, but they don't own the copyright to the
| black and white version.
|
| I don't think that is true at all - as far as I know,
| copyright on a derived work belongs entirely to the copyright
| owner of the original work.
|
| If I create and sell prints of a Game of Thrones character, I
| am infringing HBO's copyright, and any money I make are owed
| to HBO legally. If you then create T-Shirts with my print and
| sell those, you are also infringing HBO's copyright, and all
| the money you make is also HBO's legally - you don't owe me 1
| cent, since I had no right to copy HBO's work in the first
| place. If HBO wants to sell T-shirts with my print, they
| don't owe me anything.
|
| However, patent law does work like you mention - you can have
| a patent on a technology, and I can have a patent on an
| enhancement over that basic technology. I can't create a
| product based on your base technology if you don't want me
| to, but you also can't create a product based on my
| enhancement if I don't want you to.
| salted-fry wrote:
| For precedent on this, see the case Anderson v. Stallone,
| in which Timothy Anderson sued Stallone/MGM for allegedly
| ripping off his fan script for Rocky 4. Courts ruled that
| his fan script, as a derivative work of Rocky, had no
| copyright protection, and so MGM was free to rip it off if
| they wanted to.
|
| I happen to disagree, in that I think the law _should_ say
| that derivative works are co-owned by the owners of the
| original work and the creator of the derivative; but that
| does not seem to be what the law currently says.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Unless the derivative work was created with permission.
| salted-fry wrote:
| You're right - the case I'm quoting is specifically about
| _unauthorized_ derivative works, which is a pretty
| important distinction, especially in this context (as
| presumably the colorizations of Garfield were authorized)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Right, and since the online Garfields have unique
| colours, and future licensees can't just use them. They'd
| need to put in the effort to re-colourize, or pay the
| site for their colourized versions too.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| The new copyright only applies if the derivative work was
| created with permission
| f_allwein wrote:
| while we're at it, you might also enjoy
| https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
| easton wrote:
| In a similar vein, https://3eanuts.com
| vvye wrote:
| Or Square Root of Minus Garfield, which is about all sorts of
| wacky edits: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/
| wendelscardua wrote:
| See also:
|
| Square Root of Minus Garfield -
| https://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1
| gtsteve wrote:
| Similarly, you also might enjoy /r/imsorryjon [0] for Garfield
| inspired horror art. It never ceases to amaze me how talented
| some people are:
|
| *
| https://old.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/comments/gqxe91/the_forg...
|
| *
| https://old.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/comments/e607or/godfield...
|
| [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/
| phjesusthatguy3 wrote:
| There's a fantastic review of Garfield Kart Furious Racing on
| rockpapershotgun[0]
|
| [0]https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/11/18/garfield-kart-
| fu...
| saagarjha wrote:
| While we're at it, there's Lasagna Cat:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Hopefully there will be another flood before 2030!
| rozab wrote:
| I am positive this whole exchange happened on HN no more
| than 3 days ago
|
| EDIT: 12 days ago, but still. I feel internet culture
| became somewhat static in the last few years.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25064671
| saagarjha wrote:
| I didn't read that thread, I swear
| enneff wrote:
| The same author wrote this wonderful article on Garfield.
|
| http://wondermark.com/the-comic-strip-doctor-garfield/
| donw wrote:
| Reading the Sunday morning color comics was one of the highlights
| of my week growing up.
|
| While many things are better, I feel that we've lost something in
| the modern world, in that each day pretty much feels the same as
| any other.
|
| If we want special times in our lives, we now have to make that
| for ourselves. The world no longer provides much in the way of
| those intrinsic demarcations.
|
| And I rather doubt printed newspapers will even exist by the time
| my future kids would be of age to read them.
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't know, Clough42 typically publishes a new YouTube video
| on Sundays that I look for on Mondays (because of our
| timezones).
|
| Not quite so consistent lately I think, but my point is that
| even if things change and children don't read comics any more
| (is that even true?) that doesn't stop the new things having
| similar schedules or things to look forward to.
| massysett wrote:
| I used to enjoy reading the "today in history" feature in the
| daily paper. I find the Wikipedia article of the day email is
| a good substitute.
|
| Haven't found a good substitute for the comics though.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| There are plenty of good online comic strips. I have nine
| in my RSS feed and keep up with them regularly. I can give
| a few suggestions if you're interested.
| tralarpa wrote:
| > The world no longer provides much in the way of those
| intrinsic demarcations.
|
| I have the same feeling about many other things nowadays. Daily
| life just a few years ago was more structured. In my country,
| shops were always closed on holidays (often of Christian
| origin) and on Sundays. The availability of things was
| restricted: If you needed something on Saturday evening you had
| to wait until Monday. If you wanted to rewatch your favorite TV
| series, you had to wait until a TV channel decided to rerun it.
| News programs were only broadcasted three times per day etc.
|
| And now with COVID and working at home, even the difference
| between work time and free time is blurred.
|
| I know that these restrictions were mostly artificial and I am
| happy that I have now more freedom to do things when _I_ want
| to do them. But it also meant that there was a rhythm of life
| shared with your neighbors. You knew when your friends were at
| home and you knew when the kids at school or the colleagues at
| work would discuss the latest episode of some TV series
| (because it was always broadcasted on a specific day of the
| week).
|
| As you said, we are now responsible for giving structure to our
| lives. Which is of course also a sign of maturity.
| jjar wrote:
| If you're in the UK I find Private Eye to be an clever,
| excellent + balanced magazine if you're looking for something
| to read. Plus it's still nice to have things in print, and I
| don't think the demand will go away.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This seems to be a standard pattern. Most comics seem to do this,
| in some way.
|
| I suspect that it's a trick to help keep the reader engaged.
| zorked wrote:
| I agree, and I was confused regarding the comments about the
| colors of the rooms in Garfield's house. The last pane even
| sort of implies it's "realistic", in that there seem to be two
| walls that actually have those colors.
|
| For comparison: in this Italian Donald Duck comic, what color
| is the wall? https://imgur.com/a/WamFxpG
|
| And what color is the sky in this Monica's Gang comic?
| https://imgur.com/a/ADvrozM
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Looking at your second example, I think the sky tone changes
| with mood. I can't read the language of the strip, going off
| how the characters look to me..
|
| Blue - neutral mood Yellow - tension Purple - anger
| egypturnash wrote:
| The wall is colored "whatever the hell works with what the
| inker did", if you ask me. :)
| vidarh wrote:
| Yeah, I looked at it and this seems completely normal to me as
| someone having grown up somewhere (Norway) where comics were a
| far more integral part of the culture (US comic book artists
| often tour Scandinavia, as even newspaper strips often get
| monthly ensemble books in the Scandinavian countries, and some
| comics sell more in even individual Nordic countries than the
| US at times).
|
| Comedic comics often do this kind of thing, though the specific
| patterns may differ. Especially coloured versions of newspaper
| strips because they were often originally published in black
| and white, and so there were often no clear guides on colour
| from the original artists and it's easier to then have the
| colouring follow some rough set of patterns than to spend time
| agonising over it, and focus of often far more on making it
| easily and quickly digestible than particularly artistic.
|
| There's a reason Calvin and Hobbes was such a major revolution
| in the newspaper strip market - with few exceptions newspaper
| strips were not considered to really be focused on the art; it
| was about the gag. You had strips where the artist very
| obviously cut and pasted and reused panels multiple times, to
| the point where some strips included meta-jokes about how
| little effort went into the art of some series.
|
| Returning to the colouring, Hagar the Horrible is one example,
| which while more constrained than Garfield, it took me just a
| couple of clicks to find examples where the interior wall of a
| house changes colour between panels back and forth with the
| dialogue.
|
| EDIT: Here's a Hagar strip where that is particularly
| noticeable, as the background colour changes very specifically
| to emphasise an outburst:
|
| https://www.facebook.com/hagarthehorrible.net/posts/-31-new-...
| anthk wrote:
| Those colour shifts happened with cheap comic books in Spain
| in the 70-80's, done with a crazy colour pallete with just
| consistency for the characters, furniture and the sky. Those
| were in the Spanish slapstick comedy media. If any Spaniard
| read this, for sure he knows the Bruguera school. And, yes,
| Frenchies, we copycated you several times.
| toyg wrote:
| I agree. Generally speaking, I found it difficult to
| empathize with the writer's marvel for recolored strips, in
| sentences like "The notion that a strip might have been
| colored differently from paper to paper opens up a whole new
| world of imagination". Dude, this has been done all over the
| comic industry since coloring existed, there are entire
| series dedicated to doing exactly that to specific bodies of
| work. Sure, newspapers strip are their own little niche in
| many ways, but this is hardly unique or original in Garfield.
| I'm somewhat surprised a fairly famous strip artist in his
| own right (David Malki of Wondermark) wouldn't know that.
| dmd wrote:
| > You had strips where the artist very obviously cut and
| pasted and reused panels multiple times
|
| The end-state of which, of course, is Dinosaur Comics, which
| is the same art [almost, 99.9%] every single strip.
| tokai wrote:
| I read a lot of old donald duck comics as a kid. The European
| ones made by Italian Disney and Egmont. The strips from the
| 70s were absolutely wild in their colouring, with objects
| changing colour throughout the story and with a palette would
| fit right in with an acid trip. Only half of the pages were
| coloured to save money.
|
| So in my experience you're right. It's a very normal thing
| for comics.
| anthk wrote:
| Ditto in Spain with the infamous Bruguera comics (Mortadelo
| y Filemon are as known in Spain as much as Don Quixote, if
| not more).
|
| Have an example:
|
| http://museodelcomic.triguerostudios.es/2018/05/la-
| escuela-b...
|
| Later in the 90's the colours got right and with far more
| tones, and the old comic books has been reprinted at least
| twice, and a lot of reprinted volumes today have a much
| better colouring and inking.
|
| I mean, the exact same volumes, but with a far better
| colour pallete, a much bigger one.
| zzbzq wrote:
| I believe it has something to do with classically being printed
| in black and white newsprint. The colors selected in the color
| cartoon are actually just a mapping to different grayscale
| patterns based on the lightness/darkness level.
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