On the bonkers color palette of Garfield comics
wondermark.com
wondermark.com
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?)
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/04/star-trek-discoverys-vers...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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...
Here's the QEMU image and color palette: https://imgur.com/b1XGFB4 / https://gist.github.com/akx/f74b840f630fdc10219d9d5211a38c7a
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/02/27/part-1-how-t...
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.
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.
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?
You might be interested in subscribing to the dead trees version of the Funny Times:
Honestly, that’s usually my reaction to Garfield as well. The strips often seem like they don’t have a punch line at all.
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.
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.
Agree, Although I really liked the Garfield animated show in the late 80's/early 90's.
Are you comfortable sharing roughly how old you are? Or the era of Garfield comics you were reading, if you weren't getting them via a newspaper. I'm interested because I really liked Garfield as a kid, but now find it depressingly, cynically formulaic and boring. Obviously I was much more easily pleased back then, but I think there was a certain period when Garfield comics were significantly more vibrant and creative and varied than the rut they eventually settled into. I'm not sure whether the end of this period coincided with Davis farming out the creation of the comic to a sweatshop; my guess is that it predated it, but I don't know the exact dates.
edit: I'm not sure if it literally made me laugh, though, even as a child. I think I (somehow) enjoyed the world and the characters more than the punchlines. I read them in books rather than in a daily paper, which helped; an unfunny strip didn't have to bear any weight, you could pass right over it, take in any narrative/character development in a few seconds and move on.
The problem I think with formulaic comics is that there's no vision after the original creator hands them over to someone else. It's just making sure they draw the same way, and don't say or do anything too controversial, oh that Garfield and his lasagnas, ha ha, etc.
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.
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.
Haven’t found a good substitute for the comics though.
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.
* https://old.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/comments/gqxe91/the_forg...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/comments/e607or/godfield...
EDIT: 12 days ago, but still. I feel internet culture became somewhat static in the last few years.
[0]https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/11/18/garfield-kart-fu...
Square Root of Minus Garfield - https://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1
https://www.literateape.com/blog/brian-sweeney/we-need-to-to...
The cat is not heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual. It changes from strip to strip. Also, it speaks in a verra verra raff lengwidge.
“This is the brick that made a comics legend! Pyramided it to the stars!”
“A square pyramid?”
“Well, it’s more oblong...”
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...
Also, real shades have color and painters know how to paint with peachy-colored shadows just fine.
I suspect that it's a trick to help keep the reader engaged.
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-...
The end-state of which, of course, is Dinosaur Comics, which is the same art [almost, 99.9%] every single strip.
So in my experience you're right. It's a very normal thing for comics.
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.
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
Blue - neutral mood Yellow - tension Purple - anger
Ah, someone else said it was basically done for copyright reasons, someone had the copyright to the coloring alone somehow? Another case of copyright ruining things I guess.
Perhaps, but then again you have Bill Watterson.
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.
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.
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.