DCML digest, Vol 1 #993 - 15 msgs

Sue and Gary Leach bangfish at cableone.net
Mon Jul 1 21:33:45 CEST 2002


Timo:

I don't know if Barks gave any
guides to colorist but most of the times he gave any guides they were
ignored (!) mainly because printer who did the printing plates removed them
before comics were colored. Therefore they might even vary in different
        reprints. Sad.

Comic books were invented as a second mass market outlet for newspaper comic
strips, so production values were bottom of the barrel. Editors and creators
eventually arose to introduce originality and quality into the stories, but
they were without influence over the production values, which continued on
pretty much as they'd begun. And the coloring, though a prime feature of
comic books, was part of the production process.

Black and white material, such as line art, is something any press can
handle, and for the least expense. Color, on the other hand, is by far the
most costly aspect of a print job (it was originally done by engravers, who
worked directly on the printing plates using very nasty chemicals), and
entirely reliant on the capabilities of a particular press and of the
production process built around it.

As you might imagine, when publishers began putting out magazines promising
"All in Color for a Dime", they wanted to make sure the color was done as
cheaply as possible. Therefore it was the printing plant, not the editors or
artists, that established the color palates and the procedures by which
color would be handled. (Publishers, in fact, often had the printer's color
palates boiled down even more, to further speed up the production process
and reduce cost. And printers often adopted these reduced palates in turn.)

In such an environment, colorists were valued not for their artistry but for
their capacity to accommodate the production process. And as costs rose and
profits margins narrowed, this capacity became increasingly important, to
the point that many publishers had a bare handful of colorists - and
sometimes just one - to crank out color guides that were sent to companies
hiring unskilled labor for minimum wage to produce the materials needed for
printers to burn color plates.

That was the situation for American newsstand comics when Gladstone came
along back in 1985, at the tail end of that whole dubious "era". At that
point the personal computer, like a beneficent virus, began to seriously
invade the comic book production process and eventually bring to the
colorist the power to confidently establish, if not outright cement, what
would go on, and come off, the press.

This has not removed coloring from being part of the production process, but
it has, interestingly enough, turned the colorist into the equivalent of the
old-time engraver - without having to use any of those nasty chemicals,
thank god.

Gary 
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