DCML Digest, Vol 26, Issue 23

[Gary Leach]

Cord, Timo,

> There were young ladies as colorists (true!)

Here in the States, for comics, the job of creating the mechanicals for 
color reproduction was seen - and handled - as low-skilled, low-paying 
work. And, yes, it was mainly done by women.

> who used either half mechanical method or just by creating different 
> layers of transparent dotted cels cutting them with exacto knife (very 
> sharp pen like knife).

Right, except for the "dotted" part. Layers, or overlays, were created 
using either rubylith or amberlith (clear film coated on one side by 
colored gel), that were then put on the camera and screened to create 
dots - in their the proper density and angle for the particular printed 
colors they were cut for. The trouble with this method is that one 
overlay can only account for one value of one color. Another method, 
and the one used by the last major traditional-method - that is, 
pre-computer - comics color house in this country, Chemical Color, used 
gray-toned "fluorgraphic" paints that could represent different values 
of cyan, magenta, or yellow on one overlay. The comics, digests and 
albums of Gladstone I - and all comics in the U.S. prior to the late 
1970s - were done this way, using a very limited palette; in the last 
years of that era it was down to 64 colors.

> Using different kind of dotted cels, varying density of dots 
> (described as percentage and quantity of dotted lines within an inch), 
> you could create different kind of colors.

In "the good ol' days" the color dot density was described as 
lines-per-inch (lpi - a measure of vertical resolution that implies the 
horizontal resolution), and Gladstone I comics interiors were done at 
65 lpi. Very coarse, as most "quality" color printing started at 133 
lpi! There was also the more explicit dots-per-inch (dpi), but today 
it's all down to pixels-per-inch (ppi - though you still often see this 
referred to, quite inaccurately, as dpi).

> Usually different colors were identified with codes. You could create 
> 16 to 256 colors at least this way, depending on how many different 
> shades of each separate colors were used.

You could call colors out as codes using CMY (reflective primary colors 
- all printed matter is reflective), but not RGB (transmissive primary 
colors - movie projection, tv and computer screens). Chemical Color, 
however, used YRB - yellow, red, blue - designations, corresponding to 
yellow, magenta, cyan. Consistency in terminology has never been on of 
the publishing biz' strong suits.

Gary