The Blue-Green Abelard

The Lady Luck comic book cover I posted yesterday in "Lady in Green" turned out to be unexpectedly synchy. After Debbie had left a comment telling a story about how she had worn a green coat at the deli counter of a supermarket, we noticed that the comic book cover describes the green-clad Lady Luck as a "deb" and that the two buildings in the picture are labeled super market and delicatessen.

Debbie's anecdote also emphasized Kelly green as the color of her coat. As I wrote in a comment on that post, this made me think of a student of mine from years ago who was called Kelly and often dressed in green. We often used to discuss literature, our shared interest being centered on the works of Lord Byron and the Historia Calamitatum of Peter Abelard.

On the comic book cover, Lady Luck herself is wearing unambiguously green clothing. The woman in the background, standing on the sidewalk in front of the delicatessen, is dressed in what I would call blue, but Debbie considers it "more of a blue-navy green in the cyan family." Checking the RGB coordinates in MS Paint, I find that it is "in the cyan family" but is more blue than green.

The same is true of this image, which I also included in that post and said suggested "green women's clothing." It, too, is cyan with more blue in it than green. (I think the purer blue of the tablecloth makes the curtains look green by contrast.)

So blue-green ambiguity was a feature of that post, and it also led to me thinking about a former student with whom I used to discuss Byron and Abelard.

All the syncs made me curious about the Lady Luck comic book, and I searched a bit to see if I could find its contents, not just the cover, anywhere online. No luck so far, but one of the sites I visited was a Fandom site called Public Domain Superheroes. When I clicked on the comic book cover there, a gallery of other images came up, one of which was this:

It's a 1938 advertisement for a very strange product line: hunting trophies of imaginary animals sculpted by Dr. Seuss himself. I mean, who hasn't seen a cute critter in a Dr. Seuss book and wished they could shoot it and mount its head on their wall? One of the three trophies available is called the Blue-Green Abelard:

Here's the description:

Unlike the average fur-bearing animal that changes its coat but once a year, the Blue-Green Abelard changes every night for dinner.

Blue-green for the hustle bustle of the day, it adopts Green-blue for the formalities of the evening.

Approximately two feet tall. The beautifully convoluted horns of the Abelard make it an ornament that will lend distinction to any room.

Hand painted in oil. Mounted on a fine hard wood base. $15

Fifteen dollars in 1938 is the equivalent of $340 today. If that seems like a lot, genuine Seuss Abelards are selling online for more than 100 times that.

One more thing to note is that Debbie's Lady in Green syncs centered on a coat of hers. The description of the Abelard emphasizes its ambiguously colored coat and punningly speaks of it as if it were a coat worn by a person rather than an animal's coat of fur.