THE PROCESS BECAME LESS SECRET

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Efforts are being made to revive the natural cartoon dye industry, especially as a suitable employment for retired cartoon characters and their families. In the early days, of course, all characters were black and white, sometimes in combinations that gave shades of gray. But there came a time when such a look had run dry, as it were, and artificial colors, let alone digital, were still a long way off, and so the characters began to seek out ways of attaining hues. Assorted lichens easily obtainable in the vicinity around the  studio—white, dark rock, and limestone—were used to make reds, yellows, and browns. Blueberry and elderberries yielded blues and purples. Green came from bareroot, and dark green from rubber rabbitbrush. Loganberries and brier produced deep orange, and pink came from a mix of maple-tree bark, calvatia cythiaformis, and Nadia blossoms. These plants were treated in a manner initially known only to the earliest characters, mainly anthropomorphized dogs and cats, along with the occasional anthropomorphized  pig or horse, but as time went on the processes became less secret, and certain other cartoons—clowns, stick-men, sailors, babies, goggle-eyed boxers, talking furniture, and the like—came to understand how to create colors. It became common. Today, those early characters look at belated adopters as if they would like to wash them out with acid, and the sight of a brightly-hued clown or baby is akin to heresy.