Gemstone's Coloring

[Thomas Pryds Lauritsen]

YMH at aol.com wrote:
> For a really bad example, look at the first page of "World Wide Witch," 
> in Uncle Scrooge 320. All those books and shelves, a uniform shade of blue.

I think that often when whole areas (mostly backgrounds), which might 
even include the Ducks, are coloured in a uniform shade, it is done in 
order not to call too much attention to that part of the drawing, 
probably since something else is happening in that panel that really 
should be the centre of attention. I don't know if the exact case of 
"World Wide Witch" can be related to this, though.

However, I do notice that when Gemstone does this, the counterpart print 
in Scandinavia *does* often colour such areas non-uniformly, and most of 
the times, I must admit that I like the Gemstone colouring better.

> For an example of the kind of coloring of black and white line art that 
> I'm talking about, look here:
>  
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0963660942/ref=sib_rdr_fc/104-3578324-7328738?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S001#reader-link 
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0963660942/ref=sib_rdr_fc/104-3578324-7328738?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S001#reader-link>

Oh, I agree that the colouring of the Bone covers is marvellous, and I'd 
very much like to have such colouring applied to Disney covers. But I 
think it might be too much if whole stories were coloured this way. I'm 
afraid it might take away the attention from the story, but perhaps this 
is just because I've always seen Disney comics coloured the "flat" way.

 From earlier in your mail:
 > But most of the Gemstone coloring has been flat expanses of color, like
 > something out of '60 television animation. Not a bad thing, necessarily,
 > if that's what you're going for, but, well...

Actually, what I see is a hydrid of those flat areas and the many shades 
of the Bone cover. Just take a look at the shading of the sky and other 
(mainly) backgrounds of the first pages of "Fools of the Trade" (also 
Uncle Scrooge 320). One might have chosen to use shading a little more 
than is the case, though -- eg for the characters in focus. Perhaps 
something like on the cover of US 320.

But I see the same thing in Danish issues; shading used primarily for 
backgrounds and large, otherwise uniformly coloured areas in the 
stories, and shading used to a higher degree on covers (but not to the 
extent of the Bone cover example at all).

Notice that the Bone comic itself is uncoloured, so I think it's a 
little hard to say whether the colouring of the cover would really have 
been too much if applied to the story, too. Are there any comics in the 
USA (or other countries) with that level of colouring used throughout 
the stories?

What I don't like about US 320 (now, we're at it), although this 
probably doesn't qualify as colouring, is the image quality of the 
reprint of The Madball Pitcher. All the edges look woollen and blurry, 
as if an old print was just scanned in and used in the issue.

-- 
Thomas Pryds Lauritsen