1767: Garfield's Color Theater
Garfield's Color Theater |
![]() Made by: NES Boy |
Explanation[edit | edit source]
This strip essentially demonstrates differences between different digital archives of the same original Garfield strip; the less-saturated version is presumably taken from the now-busted "images.ucomics.com" domain, while the more-saturated version is presumably taken from the former Garfield's Art Gallery site. To make this demonstration the strip's primary focus, Garfield's dialogue is slightly tweaked in panels one and three, and entirely deleted in panel two.
The author's notes tend to explain more details about the digital archives in use at the time, with an additional post-submission note revealing Garfield's Art Gallery no longer hosting the images but also explaining the workings of garfield.com's own strip archive.
All three paragraphs of the author's notes proper have since been affected by various changes in workings of Internet sites. The first paragraph, detailing the now-busted "images.ucomics.com" domain, is perhaps the least affected of them; the unsecured domain in question busted during the summer of 2023, but its secure-domain mirror "picayune.uclick.com" still works in the same fashion as its now-busted unsecured counterpart. The second paragraph, detailing Garfield's Art Gallery, was first affected by that site dropping its strip archive as explained in the third paragraph, then the site itself being taken down sometime after Viacom's acquisition of the Garfield IP. The third paragraph, detailing the demise of the Garfield's Art Gallery archive and explaining garfield.com's archive's workings, was affected by the takedown of garfield.com on 2020-06-19 which saw the archive in question dismantled.
The author writes:[edit | edit source]
For a long while, the Garfield strips are sourced from the URL of "images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/YYYY/gaYYMMDD.gif". As you go through the archive, however, you'll notice the colors of the strip become less saturated starting from 2006-02-25. Also, the Sunday comics inexplicably switched over to the (lower quality) JPEG file format from 2010-11-21 onwards.
Fortunately, the same strips are archived at Garfield's Art Gallery, and there, they do not suffer from loss of saturation, and the Sunday strips are always in the Graphics Interchange Format. Plus, the black and white versions can be found there as well. The colored strips can be found with the URL of "www.garfieldcollectibles.com/cstrips/YYYYc/stripYYYY-MM-DDc.gif", while the black and white variants are over at the URL of "www.garfieldcollectibles.com/bwstrips/YYYY/stripYYYY-MM-DD.gif".
EDIT: The Garfield's Art Gallery site no longer hosts the images, but the colour shifted versions can be seen (at double size) at http://strips.garfield.com/iimages1200/YYYY/gaYYMMDD.gif
Original strips: 2006-02-25, 2006-10-28, 2010-11-21.
Transcript[edit | edit source]
Garfield: Welcome to "Garfield's Color Theater".
{Garfield and the background change color saturation}
Garfield: You have been watching "Garfield's Color Theater".
Trivia[edit | edit source]
It is presumed that the 2006-02-25 and 2010-11-21 original Garfield strips were not meant to receive formal strip credits; the remnants of the old crediting system credits neither strip, only two different versions of 2006-10-28. The other two strips are presumed to have been given credits in the current crediting system due to how the transition between crediting systems worked, looking through the entire author's notes instead of simply what corresponded to the old crediting system, saw the links to those strips, and credited them accordingly.