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Comment by Sunspark | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> As an aside, who exactly was the target viewing demographic for Garfield? Garfield was never funny for me as a kid. Never.

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.

I'm almost 50. I remember Garfield in both the newspapers and in book form primarily. Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side were lit however and it might be unfair of me to use them to contrast against because they were all masterpieces of creative genius. Maybe Garfield is best contrasted against other generic syndicated formulaic comics like Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, Hagar the Horrible, etc.

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.

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.

> 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.

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