Devices

In this blog I don't often talk very much about the "mechanics" of comic strips. The Silent Penultimate Panel Watch does a pretty good job of that, as do a handful of others, but I usually just talk about the content and whether or not I find it amusing and stuff like that... but today's On The FastTrack does something very I've never seen before, and I had to comment on it:

In case you didn't notice, the first and third panels are in colour, and the middle panel isn't. Now, having colour in the daily strips is a relatively modern thing, when I was a kid only the Sunday comics were coloured, but these days some newspapers have coloured comics all week, and whether or not you see them in colour online depends on, among other things, which syndicate owns that title. I don't know a whole lot about the inside of the comic strip business, so I don't know if the cartoonists submit both coloured and non-coloured versions of each strip to their syndicate, or if the syndicates get someone else to colour them, so if this is laziness, I don't know who's the one being lazy... but, to be fair, it's nowhere near as lazy as the old stand-by, the silhouette.