Complications in the "Funny Pages"

I'm a devoted reader of The Comics Curmudgeon, and I can't help but compare the site's snarky analysis of newspaper comics to what we've been talking about in class.

I mean, Josh Fruhlinger is obviously more interested in subverting the contents of the comics pages for his own purposes than in subjecting them to the kind of analysis we've seen from Ault and Chatman, but there's certainly analysis involved. You can't mock effectively without analyzing first. And I've learned a thing or two about how newspaper comics are made and distributed just by reading his posts.

What I especially want to talk about, because I never would have known this otherwise, is what happens comics intended for print being placed online. In the newspaper, at least on weekdays, they're black-and-white. Online--that is, on the syndicate's website--they're often colorized. It makes sense, on one level: color comics are flashier, attention-grabbing. And the cost of color ink isn't an issue.

But the process of coloring the comic is a problem, especially the way the syndicates handle it. The artists don't color the comics themselves. And, evidently, the colorists don't actually work with the artists, either. They fill the line drawings with whatever colors make sense to them. If you don't see the issue yet, well, you will.

Take the Curtis strip from this post. (Image reproduced below.)

The teacher is blonde and fair-skinned. No problems here.

But here's Curtis again, about a month later:

No, your eyes don't deceive you. Now she's black-- like the majority of the characters in the strip. (The nurse, interestingly, is white.)

Here's what Josh had to say about it (from this post):

If I may talk seriously for a moment: some readers have speculated that these mysterious racial shifts have been designed to accommodate editorial grumbles about the merest hint of miscegenation. Truly, I think you’re giving the comics coloring world far too much credit, in terms of thinking that weird things actually happen for reasons. The online versions of the King Features strips are not colored by the artists, nor do the artists offer guidance for same. The colorists can only use the internal context of the strip to help them make their choices.

So how does this complicate our interpretation of newspaper comics-- especially if we're looking at them online? I think this example is a particularly good one: what does the color choice for Ms. Honeystump's skin say about the colorist's assumptions, in either strip? In the first, we might read the suggestion that white, blonde women are at the apex of sexual attraction: she's colored (ahem) that way because she is presented as desirable in the text. In the second, it's the change that's disturbing: Can a black student only be taught by a black teacher? Only attracted to a member of his own race? (And just why is her hair gray here, anyway?) Or is it the indifferent white nurse who's being degraded here? It's hard to say, and harder still to figure out, after all this, just what the artist's intentions were.

A Chatman-style analysis would be impossible here. We can't derive meaning from the color because it isn't determined by the artist. Sometimes the colorization is so thoughtlessly done it even ruins the joke, as we see here or here.

Graphic novels aren't subject to this problem, but for newspaper comics, the situation seems dire. Syndicates don't often seem to care about what their artists want (see also: Bill Watterson's entire career) or what they're trying to communicate. I think it's understandable, then, that graphic novels take themselves so seriously. The authors are afraid that if they tried to be comical, maybe this is the level of respect they'd get.