The Island of California

This is from the yellow wallpaper series. The top image is typical of the way we present and view Geranium Lake Properties on the internet. I am lucky to have access to color transparencies of Yost's original art, and the color is as brilliant and accurate as my computer can make it. GLP began as a black-and-white single panel comic (Yost was influenced by New Yorker cartoonists like Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg) and there exists a popular notion that Yost began to experiment with color only in the later years of the comic. Actually, his color experiments date from the beginning of GLP, and Yost used color in some of his early conceptual sketches.

Yost's distributors were adamant in their resistance against anything that was not black-and-white, but they eventually relented and accepted full-color work. Most newspapers received the color panels after they had been rendered into grayscale. Some newspapers chose to print color, with varying degrees of failure. The falures usually delighted Yost.

The bottom image gives you an idea of how the color of Geranium Lake Properties looked when printed in newspapers, beginning on the left with a grayscale representation.