nothin Doonesbury Color “Snafu” Honors Westville… | New Haven Independent

Doonesbury Color Snafu” Honors Westville Artist

DAVID SEPULVEDA PHOTO

The Sunday December 4 strip. Courtesy Garry B. Trudeau.

The first splash of color in this week’s nationally syndicated Doonesbury Sunday strip by Garry B. Trudeau doesn’t appear until the sixth panel of the nine-panel strip. So what happened to the color?

Detail Strip panel.

According to strip protagonists Mike and Zonker, the reason for the lapse of color in their normally hue-saturated world is that the strip’s colorist, whom they refer to as George the color guy,” has had a family emergency.

Corsillo at his design station at Design Monsters.

George is not a fictional character, but the real-life cartoon strip colorist George Corsillo, who has been colorizing the Doonesbury Sunday strip for 16 years and works out of his Design Monsters studio in Westville, a graphic design business he shares with wife and artist Susan McCaslin.

Corsillo with YUGE! released earlier this year.

In this bit of inside cartoon baseball,” Trudeau takes a mini-break from his signature, pointed satire that has been skewering deserving, usually political targets, for decades. (He recently released YUGE!, a compilation of 30 years of Doonesbury strips whose focus has been on Donald J. Trump, the gold standard for big, honking hubris” according to Trudeau; Corsillo designed the book’s cover.

Corsillo said he read through Trudeau’s panel-by-panel coloration directions to the production team that started with Trudeau saying, this one’s a semi-vacation for George,” because less than half the strip would need coloring. It was then that Corsillo noticed the strip breaking the fourth wall, with him as subject.

In this week’s Sunday strip, characters Mike and Zonker think they have everything under control in response to their colorless strip: How hard can Photoshop be?” asks Zonker. It’s really nothing more than paint by numbers,” suggests Doonesbury. Zonker pours it on: Any idiot can do it!” The next two panels prove otherwise as orange snow begins to fall and the character’s blush in sickly, purple shades amid the color chaos. 

The final panel shows a dramatic color correction as the character’s coloration suddenly returns to normal and the smooth gradients and natural hues signal George’s return to the job. Zonker’s politically incorrect punchline? So color shaming works. Good to know!”

Reading between the panels, one may glean a metaphor, whether intended or not; the color that has drained from the strip is not unlike the color drained from the countenance of many in the aftermath of the election season.

A bit of good news is that in true life, George’s family emergency” was just a fictional foil. Corsillo said he was both surprised and honored when he received the strip for coloration.

I’m going to have to get Garry to sign a print for me” he said.

An earlier Saranac Lake Winter Festival poster by Trudeau and Corsillo.

Corsillo is presently working on a new poster collaboration with Trudeau for the 2017 annual Saranac Lake Winter Festival held in the Adirondacks, a charity event with deep roots in the Trudeau family.

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