Thankgod for colour!
I must say when I read the title "a word about colour" and saw the few little bits on colour in the last panel of the page I got rather excited because, we as visual beings, respond to colour and lets face it, the book was rather dull in black and white. What is a comic book without colour anyway? And well good old McCloud answered just that. Due to commerce and technology comics found it hard to move into colour. Once the technology was there to produce coloured comics there was also the dilemma of production costs. However once they overcame that hurdle it was found that people responded better to coloured comics and so colour boosted the sales.
As humans we respond to colour. We are very visual and I have often wondered how those who were born blind could ever grasp this concept of colour. Like Kandinsky beleived; “colours could have profound physical and emotional effects on people.” We in fact have almost created a language where by we have linked each colour to an emotion: red= angry, yellow=happy, blue=sad, green=envy, purple=sexually frustrated, pink= girly and the list goes on. Colours also are very symbolic and certain colour combinations have iconic power and can represent certain objects or things. Like McCloud said in comic books colour symbolizes each character.
Green and Purple
Red, blue and yellow
Corporations have also realized the power of colour and how we respond to certain colour combinations. So massive corporations spend a lot of time emphasizing their logo and their colours for people to immediately respond to colours in certain ways. For example when people say golden may immediate reaction is arches, and when people say red that stupid annoying red rooster jingle pops into your head.
The golden arches
Its gotta be red
Coloured images are by far the most interactive with our human senses and as McCloud explains colour allows things to become “an intoxicating environment of sensations.”
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