Monday, January 24, 2011

Goom Goom Goom

Here's a little update about this arc: I'm calling this the Mythillogical Beasts arc, for reasons that you'll see soon enough. But a trait of Kelly's storylines was that they didn't begin and end with precision. Bits and pieces might stray over a few weeks, and before you know it, we're caught up in a new arc that wanders on.

My point being is that I peeked ahead a bit and realized this arc will run more than 13 Sundays . . . maybe more like 18. Again, it's all fun stuff, so no one's going to suffer here. The color confusion dies down after a few Sundays and then it's almost normal.

I had an email come in from Don that had a theory about the 'off-colors':

I think the strange colors on the Pogo page you posted today result from the work having been done by a color-blind person.

Notice the preponderance of blue and yellow. These are the colors that people with varying degrees of red-green blindness can still see. (Blindness to the blue-yellow axis is very rare.)

As to why Walt Kelly would accept these results - perhaps he was too ill to feel like arguing.

That's certainly a possibility. And it's humorous to think how someone with color-blindness could be put in the position of being in charge of colors.

But as you'll see, in posts to come, the colors change in strangeness that make you think that someone's just not paying attention. The oddest detail is Churchy's two-tone head and beak. But overall the colors are lively, the art is great and the story is fun. So I'll shut up for now about this chromatic anomaly.

Enjoy the show!


1 comment:

  1. Hi folks

    Just a quick thought. This could be totally wrong, as I have no background in medicine. The way I understand it, Walt Kelly suffered from diabetes for the last years of his life. It's well known that diabetes can cause serious eye injuries, so it didn't seem far off to think that Kelly himself selected these colors.

    I did quick check on various resources on the Internet and found that color blindness can be caused by diabetes even if it's not inherited. Maybe it disappeared due to treatment or Mr. Kelly might have let someone else do the coloring after a while.

    I really don't know if this was the reason, but it makes me sad when I think about it. Still I'm happy for all the wonderful things he created throughout his life.

    //StripeCAT

    ReplyDelete