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Color. It’s in most comic books. They make the story better, or they should. You wouldn’t know it by looking at today’s books but color didn’t seem to get much consideration in the past. They just threw colors on a page and called it good. Well I can tell you that it wasn’t good, at least by todays standards

I considered myself someone who admires the work that colorists do in comics. I just read a comic that came out in the late 80’s and that made me admire the work colorists do today. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but while looking at the book from the 80’s I realized that coloring does have a major influence on more than just the look of a book. Looking at that past book, and looking at a modern book I can see that color does affect the overall work.

I don’t know why I look down on the colors in the past book. I’m certainly not a pro at coloring, but being critical of earlier attempts at coloring just makes me think that in the past coloring was an after thought for many comics. An example of this is when a character is in the panel alone and they don’t have anything in the background except white space. It used to be a common practice to fill the blank space with a solid color, usually blue, purple, yellow, or something to contrast with the character.  There was no shading or graying, it was all one solid color. Why?  Compared with most comics today, it just looks awful.  Thinking in terms of some of the elements of realism, I also noticed that I’ve never seen a subway wall painted yellow, or a bedroom have such a hideous purple paint job as in some of the panels in the book.

At the time when these strategies were used for coloring, it probably made sense; it was very common to see solid colors as backgrounds. Since it was so common it makes me think that there was a reason colors weren’t up to par or not as innovative as today’s colors. There might have been a printing limitation, as in a limitation in the range of colors that could be printed without affecting the cost of the book. Another reason could have been technology. As computer art programs became easier to afford so did the enormous palette of colors that came with them. More variety allowed more freedom. More freedom allowed colorist to try something different which caused publishers to adapt to the new coloring forms.  Those factors, and probably others, give us the end products that we see today.

Sometimes it’s a bit sad when the coloring in an old book is so bad that it’s not good enough to be called retro, or classic. It’s just horrible.  Sometimes it even makes an otherwise good plot hard to read.  Can you say remake?  Hey they do it with movies, why not with comics?  There are some books that were published in the 80’s that didn’t look bad, which shows me that someone was investing some thought into their color schemes. When I pick up a book, I am looking at the color just as much as everything in text.  I’m not just noticing that it’s there; I’m paying attention to how it helps tell the story. The last thing I want to ask myself is who would paint their bedroom such an ugly grey-purple color?