After conducting a half-dozen searches on “Questionable” and on “Content” — all unsuccessful — I can only assume that the old “I Don’t Quite Get Today’s Questionable Content” thread has vanished. So I’m starting a new one because I need to ask this:
Does anyone have any guesses as to the purpose of the magenta filter that Jeph has put over the last two strips?
It’s kinda the same color as Roko’s skin (if that’t the right term), but he’s never used it when drawing her before.
The two strips in question feature a spookybot, but he’s never used it when drawing them before.
I’m all in favor of artistic license, but this time I just don’t see any reason for it. If he’s trying to convey something with this technique, I’m not getting it.
Plus the resultant dimming of the image is really annoying to my aging eyes.
In the subreddit, it’s been suggested that it’s to show that it currently twilight, during the blue hour.
It is weird, but largely because it’s something we’ve never seen Jacques do before. It’s not at all uncommon in other comics.
Normally Jeph would just make the sky halfway between light and dark, and darken the colors with more shadows.
Alternative suggestions were that he had some sort of blue-light filter on, and forgot to disable it, so the image looks normal to him. But that seems unlikely twice in a row.
Look at the strip under Night Light and some areas look the same, but others, like Roko’s face (which is more or less the same as it usually is), get more intensely red. So if there’s a filter in use, it’s already being compensated for in his colour choices (or, more likely, he’s not using a filter and just choosing colours within a certain range). And if it was a matter of forgetting it was on, the result would be more intensely blue, as he overcompensated for the warming from the filter.
He’s been a professional artist who works primarily late at night for years. It’s extremely unlikely that he’d be using a setting that would distort his monitor’s colour display during his prime working hours.
It reminds me a bit of the use of sepia tones for flashbacks. Perhaps the interaction being depicted is taking place in the network, rather than in meatspace. That is, perhaps Spookybot initiated the conversation via Bluetooth, or whatever they use. So they’re not literally side-by-side, physically.