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One thing Garfield doesn’t get enough recognition for is truly bonkers, impressionistic color choices. The sidewalk is pink and yellow. Jon wears purple pants. Every panel is like an Easter basket.
It’s often mentioned how the rooms in their house are never any specific consistent color. The switching colors contributes to the ping-pong effect of the rhythm of the dialogue. The final panel here keeps the rhythm going while not being at all logical! Yet it works.
I’m being serious: it takes chutzpah to say “it doesn’t matter what color anything is, as long as it’s from the Cadbury brand palette.” Is the house purple or yellow? Yes. Is the entryway green or pink (as seen in the previous mailman strip)? Yes.
Fascinating—so someone recolored this. Also, the book omits the first 2 throwaway panels of all these Sunday strips, when you’d think a book would want to collect them. Implies presentation a lower priority than content. Curious to know how this strip looked in the paper in ‘87.
^ referring to this observation: https://twitter.com/trainman74/status/1330646391018852352
The ping-pong walls don’t appear when color is an important part of some other part of the strip. The static choices are still zany, though: yellow floors, pink baseboards. Nothing is white. Side note: I need more of Gwen, stat
This dog is one of the very few white (uncolored) things in the whole book. Note how the concrete is brown though. I suspect this entire 1989 book was colored from B&W art separately from how they appeared in papers. The whole book is probably colored from the same 20 swatches.
One thing I never specifically noticed until now is that the little books collect the Sundays (complete with throwaway panels). They’re not colored at all, and you can see how they suffer visually compared to the strips intended to print as B&W (full of spot blacks & halftones)
My big takeaway from this for cartoonists is that your work doesn’t necessarily have to have an “official, canonical” version. The same work can be presented in different ways depending on the context.
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.
The notion that a strip might have been colored differently *from paper to paper* opens up a whole new world of imagination https://twitter.com/teaberryblue/status/1330657607380590594
Here's the Gwen strip from above as it appears now on GoComics. The colors are different, but decisions are still being made to make them as bold as possible. The green of Gwen's outfit here can only exist online in RGB colorspace. 2nd pic shows all the out-of-print-gamut colors.
This is that strip converted to print-safe CMYK. It still looks just as interesting, and is actually less abrasive to the eye. Yet someone at PAWS or somewhere is deliberately coloring Garfield strips with R122 G255 B0. If you know the Garfield colorist, please buy them a drink.
For the online version, they fixed the color of the cement in the dog strip, but made some other, very curious, choices.
Preliminary research suggests that the version of the strip that ran in (at least some) papers was probably closer to the book version. Note how dark the cement looks, even in this preview.
(I found this by assuming it would be one of the only places the word "sucker" would appear in most newspapers on October 4, 1987.)
The part of this that fascinates me the most is that, when the decision was made to color the comics for an online archive, someone seems to have considered and then answered in the negative the question of whether or not to look back at the previous versions for reference.
One final observation here is that perhaps I have been far too conservative in coloring Wondermark. Here is comic #378 colored by Philip Obermarck, which is lovely, but here is ALSO a proposed version that I did not publish (submitted by Erica Franzmann).
garfield can have little a bonus panels, as a treat https://twitter.com/BullTruh/status/1330686119067828224
This thread is now a blog post, with a bit of additional research on the shift in color palettes in the pre- and post-2000 archived comics: http://wondermark.com/garfield-color/
A commenter on the blog points out this from Wikipedia.
Still curious to me that the coloring of the archives is so garish -- but maybe that's just an artifact of the time in which they were done! Everything was garish on the web in 2000.
Still curious to me that the coloring of the archives is so garish -- but maybe that's just an artifact of the time in which they were done! Everything was garish on the web in 2000.
Since the recoloring of the strips appears to have begun no earlier than 1994 and ended no later than 2000, I can 100% believe that it was contracted to a firm that just threw a bunch of low wage workers at the coloring and told them to make them as colorful as possible.
But the central thesis of this thread still stands: even the originals, the Easter-candy-colored ones, are bonkers as heck.
Now my conspiracy theory is that the recolored strips HAD to be ultrabright contractually, to maximally distinguish them from the originals—i.e., they had to become something that WASN'T directly comparable to the printed versions already in existence; that COULD NOT be printed.
IMPORTANT GARF UPDATE: A commenter on my blog has now REALISTICALLY RECOLORED the original strip in this thread!
Which is lovely in its way, but kind of makes it seem like Garfield lives in the For Better or For Worse universe
Which is lovely in its way, but kind of makes it seem like Garfield lives in the For Better or For Worse universe
