Last spring, I spent three quiet afternoons with a stack of Belgian comic pages from 1958. The surprise was not the blue figures; it was the discipline around them. Every cap, doorway, and pebble seemed to agree on one generous rule: keep the line clear enough for a child to follow.
The gag that stayed
The original joke was brief, but the world around it had room to breathe. A red roof made a doorway brighter, a green hill gave the eye somewhere to rest, and a white cap turned a small character into a moving punctuation mark. Nothing needed a gradient to feel alive.