Right On Colbert!!!

If ya aint can say it in four panels, ya aint better never not ta say it at all!

The Yellow Light comics and stuff.

The comics have always been a reflection of their era. That was a different time. A simpler life.

You may not remember, but back then people actually used to take more time to do everything. Even the most insignificant task, such as picking ones teeth. Why, for that you had to find and select the finest sapling, cut it down, strip the bark, and whittle it away to get the toothpick - sometimes starting over several times to create the perfect sliver. Even picking the type of wood was a task. Today, a .00025 second search on Google will tell us that the maple is the tree most suited for toothpick production, but back then... why one might have gone through the pine and the ash and even the dogwood before stumbling upon the right maple sapling. Even telling these trees apart, information available to us at the click of the mouse, took years and years of schooling back then.

And school was completely different too. There were no tests or grades or anything like we have today. You either passed the grade or did not survive the harsh winter. The lucky children that got to go to school to learn their tree names had to walk a minimum of thirteen miles - uphill no matter what direction they came from (Often, the drafty one-room schoolhouses were located at the top of the highest hill in the county). There was no form of transportation back then, save the carriage. The hardiest of the children - the ones who made it through grade four - were chosen to receive the honor of pulling their parents carriage through the unpaved, mud-soaked streets.

Thus a carriage ride, even one of a relatively short distance, would take upwards of three days time. The parents, having nothing better to do during this period, would read the news of the world in oversized tabloids like The Globe or The Herald. Now, as we know, the world was also larger back then. Due to the distance and hardship of traveling everyone stayed only in their home-town their entire lives. The people of one village held little import in the news from even their closest neighbors. Thus, what became known as "long distance news" fell out of favor.

The papers, scrapping this costly and unpopular news, scrambled to fill the space left behind. They came upon the solution of hiring undesirables to scribble nonsense in the empty spaces. Knowing these men to be slobbering drunks, they papers paid them with a drink which is rumored to have been brewed from a mixture of dirt and printers ink and at any rate is generally known at least to have been heavily watered down. But these men (now known as cartoonists) were glad to get the job, knowing in their hearts that they were unfit for normal, polite company and were lucky to have what little they got. Though their efforts were mostly incomprehensible, one could almost make out the attempt of some of these desperate men to depict a kind of message or story through their scribbles. And so, the modern comic-strip was born.

The "funny pages" (called this because the cartoonists, in the words of one comics historian, "smelled kinda funny") became quite popular. Parents would often use them to line the floor of their dirt basements where the children were kept at night (this is where the assertion that comics are just for kids comes from). Children had little recourse, throughout the night, than to stare at these comics by the half-light of the moon which filtered in through the floorboards above them. The nights were long and the children had hours with nothing to do but stare at these strange picture stories. This gave them them plenty of time to take in the then standard five or six panels (even then, six panels was pushing it a bit).

Nowadays we come to the point more quickly. We only need four panels at most.

The Yellow Light comics and stuff.

"Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?"

"Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just the world was black and white then."

"Really?"

"Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was a pretty grainy color for a while, too."

"That's really weird."

"Well, truth is stranger than fiction."

"But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was in black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?"

"Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane."

"But... But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?"

"Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the '30s."

"So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?"

"Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?"

...

The Yellow Light comics and stuff.