Reba! Come here and look at this!
November 24, 2020 7:46 AM   Subscribe

When you woke up today, you probably didn't expect to read a deep dive on the coloring and recoloring of Garfield comics by cartoonist David Malki. But here it is anyway.
posted by theodolite (13 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
FWIW, the only exactly specified colors were for the characters. After that, color choice was always up to whomever was tasked with indicating color for the Sunday strips or compilation books. It was usually not anyone on the art staff doing the color indications (unless, in rare instances, the strip artist wanted a very specific color use in mind)
posted by Thorzdad at 8:00 AM on November 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


And for those who don't know, Jim Davis did not care one iota about the coloring, or much of anything else about the strip, after the second book or so.
posted by Melismata at 8:03 AM on November 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


Ummmm...That's not really true. He did hand over the penciling to another artist early on, but he continued to write the strip and do thumbnails for the artist for several years. Eventually, he stopped doing the thumbnails and started using ghost writers (whose work he still approved). But, to say he stopped caring about the strip is way off base.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:08 AM on November 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


I'm just repeating the tons of snark that Metafilter has heaped on Davis over the years (too many previouslies to link here).
posted by Melismata at 9:28 AM on November 24, 2020


Can we talk about the "throw away" panels? When I was a kid, I was always so confused why they existed. It seemed to go completely against both the interest of the artist (to sell the artwork they made - clipping it in some editions and newspapers means you're not getting paid for that work) and the newspaper (space is incredibly expensive - why purchase artwork that other publications get by without?)
posted by rebent at 9:51 AM on November 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


Garfield has carried me during these trying times. As a large blunt object I use to bludgeon Trump supporters with.
posted by zenon at 11:01 AM on November 24, 2020


I guess the throwaway panels let one of the local newspapers pay a bit more, and thus have a bit more content to lure in the hardcore garfield fans, who really want every b side and deep cut.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:08 AM on November 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


Bill Watterson Goes deep on the modular nature of Sunday strips in the preface to the complete Calvin & Hobbes - he used his clout mid career to demand papers run the full art or not at all.
posted by thedaniel at 11:49 AM on November 24, 2020 [9 favorites]


Garfield has carried me during these trying times. As a large blunt object I use to bludgeon Trump supporters with.

Did Garfield get political when I wasn't looking?
posted by Dr. Twist at 11:56 AM on November 24, 2020


Can we talk about the "throw away" panels? When I was a kid, I was always so confused why they existed. It seemed to go completely against both the interest of the artist (to sell the artwork they made - clipping it in some editions and newspapers means you're not getting paid for that work) and the newspaper (space is incredibly expensive - why purchase artwork that other publications get by without?)

You're referring to the large, seemingly unrelated panels at the top of the Sunday strips, right? Those are there to accommodate newspapers which only run the main set of panels, for whatever reason. I suppose the papers that run the panels consider them bonus content that might attract fans.

You're right about space being expensive in papers. This has led to the steady shrinkage of the size of strips in papers.

The artists get paid whether the paper runs those top panels or not. Papers pay a yearly syndication license to run the strip. They don't pay per-strip.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:42 PM on November 24, 2020


I used to work in the production room at a newspaper during the early 90s, before computers took over the job. And of course we ran the Garfield strip. (We also ran "Sylvia", a much better and unfortunately more obscure strip self-syndicated by Nicole Hollander, but she deserves her own FPP.)

The Sunday strips were provided by the syndicate with the colors already pre-separated, so if the comics artist didn't do the coloring than some anonymous drone at the comics syndicate did and the same colors were distributed to all newspapers. The newspaper laid out the Sunday comics pages any way they liked -- to the extent contractual obligations allowed (eg, Calvin & Hobbes couldn't be cut to fit, and Doonesbury had to be printed at a certain size) -- and this is where the newspaper's ad manager responsible for the comics section would decide whether to include the throwaway parts or not. There was never a consideration of whether local fans of Garfield cared about the title graphic and first throwaway gag -- they literally didn't matter -- it was entirely about fitting content to available space. The production artist, using a knife and hot wax, would lay out a page of comics, add a plastic overlay, would align the cyan color seps over the black lines, add another plastic overlay and align the magenta, and then the yellow. Using the wrong color seps on each layer was Very Bad because making new plates and scrapping a lot of color newsprint (which was sometimes higher grade paper than the daily news's paper) is Very Expensive. I've never seen it happen but I wouldn't be surprised if it sometimes did, somewhere.

> I guess the throwaway panels let one of the local newspapers pay a bit more, and thus have a bit more content to lure in the hardcore garfield fans, who really want every b side and deep cut.

Nope. The newspapers would receive a month's worth of various comics at a time in a package by mail, and could do with them as they liked. One of the privileges of working newspaper prepress was being able to read a lot of comics before anyone else could, as well as read comics the syndicate had included that the newspaper wasn't running. We read a lot of newspaper comics, is what I'm saying.
posted by ardgedee at 1:19 PM on November 24, 2020 [15 favorites]


Bill Watterson Goes deep on the modular nature of Sunday strips in the preface to the complete Calvin & Hobbes - he used his clout mid career to demand papers run the full art or not at all.

If I remember correctly even he didn’t ultimately win a huge concession there. He drew the Sundays for a half-page (as big as newspaper comics could get by that point) with papers forbidden to cut them, but allowed to scale the whole thing to a third of a page if they really wanted the smaller format.
posted by atoxyl at 4:22 PM on November 24, 2020


You're referring to the large, seemingly unrelated panels at the top of the Sunday strips, right? Those are there to accommodate newspapers which only run the main set of panels, for whatever reason. I suppose the papers that run the panels consider them bonus content that might attract fans.

In addition to this, notice how there's a frame divider at 3/4ths into the upper row, in the middle of the second row and 1/4ths into the lower row? The frame layout is intentionally like this so the strip can be re-flowed into a 4 row portrait format for books and magazines. It's common for a lot of Sunday strip comics.

Also, a big shout out to Lasagna Cat for recreating just not the bright colors, but also the abstract diagonal gradient that goes through a lot of the Garfield comic backgrounds.
posted by ymgve at 7:23 PM on November 27, 2020


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