DCML digest, Vol 1 #472 - 11 msgs

[bhc@primenet.com]

Re: the color of money

A point that I find emerging most recently from the discussion of the 
color of the money in Scrooge's money bin (see the recent remarks by 
Don Rosa and John Garvin), is the matter of traditions introduced not 
by the decisions of creators, or publishers, or even editors, but by 
the production/printing process. It was, for instance, production 
issues that imposed the usage of "!" at the end of every sentence in 
a word balloon that wasn't a question, that limited the color pallets 
of four color comics for decades (even as late as the mid-1980s the 
"standard" comics color pallet consisted of no more than 64 
unvariable colors), and even determined the physical page-image 
proportions within which artists were to work. The very four-color 
newsprint aesthetic of American comic books from their inception 
until the latter 1970s was entirely based on matters pertaining to 
production/printing and the economics of same. And if you think this 
aesthetic didn't have the qualities and weight of tradition, just 
consider that it took a major decade-long market shift to get it 
through to the major publishers that they didn't have to keep doing 
things that way, and even a little longer for it to sink in that they 
*couldn't*.
-- 
Gary

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