Hello, art lovers! (Put that down!) Today let's get out our paints and canvas and turpentine (do not drink it!) and daub up a birthday greeting to the man who invented the color blue and the Gainsburger dog food patty, Thomas Gainsborough (born in 1727)! Well, not 'xactly, but that's good enough for me, along with my theory that William of Orange invented orange and Violet Beauregard...well, my theories may be laughed at in the art world, but I say, who will laugh last? The art world, that's who.
No, while Gainsborough may not have invented the color blue, he was a pioneer in the field of Blue Studies, which is why a scholar of blue is generally named a gainsboroloist. Y'see, his contemporary, Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy and inventor of tin foil, believed
...that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish white, and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses.Luckily (or we might not have gotten Blue Beetle), Gainsborough disagreed, punched Reynolds in the snoot, and painted his most famous work of art, The Blue Boy, which combined several shades of blue and made the color the predominant shade in the work. Of course, Gainsborough is always renowned in the art world for his Mr and Mrs Andrews; Portrait of Mrs. Graham; Mary and Margaret: The Painter's Daughters; William Hallett, The Morning Walk; and Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, and the ever-classic Girl with Pigs.
But the heck with those, let's look at some comic books!
from "Imagine That" in Rocket Kelly #2 (Fox, Winter 1945), creators uncredited and unknown
Let's all give a big hip-hip-hooray today (because it's his birthday) for Norman Maurer, born today in 1926! He's not a huge a household name even within the comics fandom, but he oughta be: he's tremendously influential for his comic books featuring the Three Stooges: Norman's wife Joan was the daughter of original Stooge Moe Howard, and Norm co-managed the Stooges in their post-Columbia careers, wrote the screen stories for their movies The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962), The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963) and The Outlaws Is Coming! (1965) — the last two of which he also directed. In animation, he was a writer for Scooby-Doo, Speed Buggy, and Richie Rich, altho' we won't hold that last one against him.
