The french comic book artist Albert Uderzo, famous through his stories about Asterix, is colorblind. He says that this never was a problem for him. We don’t know from which color blindness he suffers and how pronounced his color blindness is. But it sounds anyway very impressiv to be such a well know artist while being colorblind.

Looked up at Wikipedia they say about Albert Uderzo:

He was actually born colour-blind with two extra fingers (which were surgically removed). His sight has since greatly improved.

As I understand this sentence has his color vision deficency diminished more and more since he surgically removed the two extra fingers. That’s a joke, isn’t it? For me there isn’t any relationship between those two circumstances. And how can color blindness greatly improve? This leaves me very puzzled and with a lot of questionmarks.

Further reading:
Albert Uderzo
Asterix official homepage

Related articles:
Photographer with No Color Sense
Mars in the Eyes of Colorblind Astronomer Schiaparellli

This man showed us how to get a great photographer even if you don’t have a sense for colors. I suppose he wasn’t colorblind, but a purple jacket with orange pants – even I wouldn’t dare to show up in such clothes.

As very interesting described in the blog entry of Ginny the colorblind italian astronomer Schriparalli influenced the history of Mars very much. The interesting part of this story is that he was suffering from a red-green color blindness. According to the mentioned article this was the reason, that he couldn’t distinguish some light shadings and missinterpret this. He was describing Mars in terms of ‘land’ and ‘sea’ and this missleading sights made him describe the view of ‘canali’ on the surface of the planet Mars. ‘Canali’ was translated to ‘canal’ and therefore something human made. This kicked off the missbelieves and dreams of intelligent living on Mars. The correct translation would have been ‘channels’ or ‘grooves’ which is something completely natural.

So a colorblind man inspired the world to dream of intelligent beings outside the earth and I think this is still in our minds and keeps going on. This story tells me that even if people are suffering from color blindness this is for a good reason. A reason we maybe don’t realize in our daily living and which usually only gives us trouble. But I know now that there is a reason for it and we only have to find this reason and make it public to other people so they can share those insights with us.