Stylish!
https://www.gocomics.com/darksideofthehorse/2021/12/17
(Trying SO VERY HARD to not nerd-geek out explaining inauthenticities in the gag.)
@Austin_Dern inauthenticities?
-F
@Felthry Some silly nerdy nitpicking. For example, the background in the second panel is a riff on the 1930 Fleischer Cartoon 'Bimbo's Initiation', one of the era's greatest cartoons, but not silent. And silent cartoons weren't likely to use greywashed backgrounds; they tended to use black-and-white line art.
A silent cartoon would be more likely to have a word balloon appear in the scene, too, rather than use an intertitle card like the last panel, if dialogue needed to be spelled out.
@Felthry *But*, that's foolish nitpicking, not least because the joke would be harder to parse if it were more authentic. For example, a comic strip character with a word balloon doesn't look like a silent animated character; it just looks like a comic strip character talking. Same with using simple line art rather than a greywashed background. Being more true to the premise would make the joke harder to see!
@Austin_Dern What exactly does "greywashed" mean?
-F
@Felthry Just a description of the coloring in the second panel, where everything is shades of grey, and looks like watercolored paint or maybe blended charcoal.
@Austin_Dern what makes that different from "simple line art" exactly? because i don't think we've seen any animated things that were just line art, or at least really rarely
-F
@Felthry Hi again. So, here's a frame from the Fleischer's 1931 _Bimbo's Initiation_, the thing that comic strip was riffing on. The background's what you would get with a detailed-background commission: there's a lot of shading, an attention to three-dimensionality. There's varying line weights and, for example, the shading on the table is washed out to make it look soft-focused. Very typical of sound-era silent cartoons.
@Felthry Here's a still from the Fleischers' 1927 _Koko's Earth Control_. Same animators more or less, a couple years earlier. There's a little shading for the details here, but the characters and most of the scene are black and white. In this era often the background was white paper, rather than animation cels, as quicker and cheaper to draw. Often the characters were drawn on paper too; I'm not sure if there's a cutout line on the dog's mouth.
@Felthry And here's from a different studio, the 1924 _Felix The Cat Goes To Hollywood_. Here Felix popped his tail off to use as a cane, impersonating Charlie Chaplin, who's not flattered. Again the background has some greys, but it's mostly black-and-white, with almost uniform line weight. I think one could draw this with a single pen and a ruler, a way you couldn't with _Bimbo's Initiation_.
@Felthry And the pure line art style meant it was easy for things to change shape; if you watch _Koko's Earth Control_ (CW: humor cartoon about the Earth breaking down, possible disturbing imagary) you'll see, like, a volcano turn into a man's mouth, just by slight changes in lines. That's a harder shift to make make sense with colors, or greys. But, eg, Koko or Felix could turn into a blob of ink and back into anything easily, a fun side of that style.
(Done. Thanks for tolerating me.)
@Austin_Dern huh, that really is just line art with some bits filled in
-F
@Felthry It is; it's amazing how much they did.
The earliest animated cartoons, like _Gertie the Dinosaur_, weren't just simple line art but completely redrawn, background and all, every frame! They hadn't developed animation cels back then, so, keeping to simple line art was the only way to not crush the animators.
@Austin_Dern oh it's really based on a specific frame of a thing, isn't it? -F
@Felthry Oh yes; that was a very specific callout to fans of early cartoons. Betty Boop particularly, since _Bimbo's Initiation_ is regarded as one of her earliest cartoons. (She gets a cameo in it.)
@Felthry 'Sound-era silent cartoons', sheesh, and after I wrote this up offline to make sure it made sense. Sound-era black-and-white cartoons, of course.
@Felthry Have to get to dinner, so I'll have to hold off answering for a bit. I'll be back tonight, though.