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(Artist’s rendition of my vacation)

I was away kayaking, fishing, having water balloon fights, eating ice cream, and doing other “manly” things this past week, so I’ve been designated “weekend boy” by my compatriots. What have we learned this week?

Well, for one thing we had an off-blog discussion about the incredible Trevor Von Eeden interview in The Comics Journal. Truly the must-read of the year so far. Like the Dick Ayers autobiography or the Dave Stevens book, it’s a pretty incredible record of a cartoonist’s psyche. I mean, all the stuff about Lynn Varley alone is remarkable — almost (Ok, maybe totally) too candid. Also, it reminds me of how the TCJ interviews use to be — the totally off the cuff candor of Kaluta or Conway or Chaykin in the 1980s. I think it’s less that the Journal has changed (though it has) and more that the culture of comics has shifted so much in the last 20 years. After all, by contrast that interview with Ba and Moon (contemporary young “hot” artists) is remarkable for its contentment and happiness. I mean, the industry is still bizarre but the rewards and possibilities are so much more…lucrative. Comics isn’t small anymore, I guess, and certainly what’s left of public bitching now occurs more on message boards and blogs than it does in the old style interviews. But someone who lived through all of that could speak to this better than I.

Of course, Von Eeden was/is very talented, which is pretty much what distinguishes it from, say, a million other interviews you could do with superhero artists and why I’m at all interested in him. That’s what I love that he talks about more or less drawing in ink, rather than tracing pencils, and that he’s unconcerned with any conceptual logic to his layouts — they seem to just evolve from whatever he feels like doing. Luckily the drawing and storytelling remains clear. I suppose that’s the trick.

Oh, and I sure liked Frank’s Brinkman review. I’m of course biased and I’ve been meaning to ask Mat to confirm a few things. Certainly Frank’s thoughts about relating to the work seems dead on. I also wanted to note that so much of what makes MF work has to do with Mat’s experiments with multiple generation xeroxing and the scale shifts throughout a page. Those are miraculous compositions which, as Frank so eloquently noted seem unimpeachable.

Finally, we learned from Lauren Weinstein that I’m against social interaction and a “killjoy” (oh, Weinstein, you’re in trouble!). She may or may not be right. Next week we’ll have a cage match about that very subject. Also, we have intuited that we will never be as cool as Al Jaffee, but oh lord we can try. Plus, we at CC have given birth (we’re competing with Lauren!) to a new feature which will be unveiled soon. The suspense must be killing you!

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As you know, I’ve been trying to answer an important historical conundrum: Where did Al Jaffee get the idea of depicting fish skeletons whenever he draws someone vomiting? After a long and mostly fruitless quest, eventually one of my correspondents suggested that I just ask the Master himself. So I did, mentioning Will Elder and the James Ensor drawing from last post, as well as commenter BVS’s theory about the Dutch fish. Very graciously, Jaffee answered me via e-mail:

As to vomiter’s discharges I can’t say how I came to include such things as fish/chicken bones and even false teeth (see wretching jackal in NATIONAL PERSPIRERER article…MAD #??). My childhood pal Will Elder and I shared a similar cartooning sense of humor and certain bodily functions we found funny simply because the media and refined people generally tended to make believe they didn’t exist.

The Dutch people do indeed swallow small fish whole. I was on a Mad trip across the Zuyder Zee some years ago and for lunch we dipped into a barrel, pulled out salted fish and (YECCH) swallowed whole. We did not pull the bones out. I guess the fish were small and aged with soft bones. This is a Dutch delicacy.

The drawing with guys upchucking huge fish is wild. I wonder if it’s some sort of 19th century gag (I’d gag too with a whale that size in my gut).

Anyway, thanks for the info and I hope I answered your question.

Dan tells me this is possibly the greatest post I will ever publish.

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Tonight! Brooklyn! Devin & Gary featuring Ross! Come see the vibes.
The Market Hotel
8 pm.

Tomorrow in Brooklyn!

Conversational Comics continues at Union Pool!
2pm
Telling Stories: Fiction in Comics with Jessica Abel, Jason Little & Matthew Thurber
panel discussion followed by drinks.

[UPDATE, FROM TIM: The CBLDF has just put up the audio from the last Conversational Comics event, with David Heatley, Lauren Weinstein, and Julia Wertz, and you can listen to it here.]

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Surprisingly, I still haven’t figured out a grand unified theory of comics reading. (I do think that Eisner/montage bit at the end was kind of stupid in retrospect, though not regrettably so.)

However, after much research, I can finally report that Frank’s comment about David Mazzucchelli’s theory of comics simultaneity (“The page is taken in as a whole, the two page spread. It’s not one image at a time. And it’s not necessarily linear in so much that it’s all absorbed at once and then accepted as ‘ordered.'”) is absolutely spot on. At least when you’re reading Mazzucchelli comics. It’s kind of amazing really. It works with everything from Batman to Asterios Polyp. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s true: entire spreads enter the reader’s brain instantaneously.

But the two-page-spread simultaneous reading thing doesn’t seem to work with a lot of other comics, at least not for me. And not just inferior comics, either; some of the best comics around don’t work that way. So more research is needed. I’ll be in my study.

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In the meantime, though, here’s a new stupid opinion: I like Philip Guston just fine, but I think it’s time that cartoonists started appreciating other painters now and again. (Always lead with a straw-man argument—that’s the blog way.)

Like, for instance, why aren’t cartoonists all over James Ensor? (If they are, and I’ve missed it, someone please correct me. (Actually, according to French Wikipedia, at least one European comic drew inspiration from him.))

Lauren dragged me to an exhibit of his drawings years ago, and I loved it, but I didn’t really get how great he was until I went to the retrospective that opened at MoMA last month.

For the most part, Ensor didn’t really attempt any of the sequential-art proto-comics often associated with people like Hogarth or Goya, and he had a tremendous range of tone, subject matter, and approach, but there’s no question that he often displayed the soul of a cartoonist.

For example, check out the famous self-portrait he painted in 1883, and revised five years later to add a hat and other evocative details.

Or for that matter, his later self-depiction, “My Portrait in 1960”:

(This one in particular doesn’t work in the same way without its title, which essentially functions as a caption.)

Most of the work included in the exhibit loses even more power than art always does when seen via the internet instead of in person, particularly the two enormous (and enormously complicated) drawings of Christ entering Jerusalem, and Christ revealing himself to the people. It’s impossible to tell when looking at them online, but they’re packed with incidental characters and background details that my comics-rotted brain can’t help but compare to chicken fat. He also often uses typography in a subtle, interesting ways.

Anyway, I could go through the exhibit pointing out drawing after painting after etching as possible kinda-sorta-like comics examples, but really I just wanted to use this as a setup to ask if anyone knows where Al Jaffee got the trademark fish bones so many of his characters disgorge whenever they vomit?

Because if you zoom in on “The Strike”, and move your attention to the figures leaning out of the windows to throw up on the right, I think we might have something like a 19th-century Belgian precedent!

IMPORTANT UPDATE!: I found out the answer to the fish-bones/vomit question from the man himself! Read it here.

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Check out this interview with Lauren Weinstein over at Inkstuds Radio. I’ve yet to listen to it but I’m sure it’s great, Lauren’s always got something insightful to say about Art, and Life, and the World. And after globe-trekking around Midgard the last few months to various comics festivals, I’ll bet she’s got some funny new stories to uncork.

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Hey CC faithful, Frank Santoro here this week with a riff on Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce. How do you write a review about someone as influential as Mat? You don’t. Well, I don’t. Won’t. Writing about Teratoid Heights would be one thing, but a Multiforce collection? Kill me now. If I do a straight review, it’ll be 5000 words. I’ve got that much to say about this book. It’s terrifyingly good and an indispensable record of possibly the most important serialized comics of the post-Ware era.

And I’m not just saying that—cuz honestly I usually prefer Brinkman the artist—the poster designer, the sculptor, the installation artist, the “draw-er”—to Brinkman the cartoonist. I could appreciate the touch and accuracy evident in the comics but … I just didn’t feel like diving in, I guess. I’d seen his first collection, Teratoid Heights, and liked it but liked it like I like most silent Jim Woodring comics. I always think, “Wow, that’s beautiful,” then flip through it in two seconds and put it down. So I mostly engaged Brinkman’s comics this way. A lot. Even when I’d see a stray Paper Rodeo laying around, I’d just read a few of the gag cartoons within Multiforce—I wouldn’t really sit with it for any real amount of time. Sometimes I’d quickly decode the sequencing and be impressed by the architecture of it all, but I still never dove in. The water looked really deep.

I guess I was more interested then in studying the other side of the Fort Thunder coin: Chippendale. Chipper’s formal grid appealed to me, then as it does now, as something to contain the energy and vitality of the drawing. Brian’s comics often fix the reader’s eye upon the protagonist and then MOVES the reader through the corridor of action sort of like a single-POV video game.

In contrast, Brinkman pulls the camera back and allows the architecture of his world to UNFOLD in its own time, at its own pace. By doing so it feels to me as though the narrative action turns back in upon itself which opens up numerous readings. The pace slows down as one sequence SCALES into the next, alternating and differentiating each moment while maintaining the whole. Brinkman creates CENTERS of visual interest and of narrative importance that ROOT the progression of the panels and map the way for the reader. The reader accumulates the story through this natural unfolding and “spiraling” back rather than being MOVED through the space like Chippendale.

So, Multiforce. Seeing the strips together completely altered my feelings towards Brinkman’s comics. I could see the complexity of his page layouts (when I would read each installment separately) but I never dreamed how beautifully it would all fit together as a serial comic strip. Each strip forms a section of the map which permits the reader to navigate the startling jumps in scale.

For the uninitiated: I’ll try and describe the plot ever so loosely. A race of Giants attack Citadel City. The Micro-Men evacuate in a Giant Mega-Mobile Man life-form. Battles abound. Chaos ensues.

Got it? Great. Basically, it’s all set up for Mat to showcase his drawing chops. But instead of going all out and just wowing the audience with carefully trained money shots, Brinkman organically spins a line of thought that spiderwebs ‘cross the page. Up, down, diagonally, inside and out, piece by piece, branch by branch the story of the Micromen and Giants spirals in upon itself and unfolds according to an incredibly articulated framework of panels and gag cartoons that run parallel to each other. This is not the steady beat and sheets of sound of Chippendale, this is some haunting vibration of cosmic strings.

And truly do the lines vibrate. Brinkman seems to be concerned with how the drawings “read.” Crisp lines, fuzzy Xeroxes, greys, blacks, noisy whites. What’s created is a language and a “vibration” for each character and each set-piece. It’s an appealing mix because the characters and the landscape really interact. This interaction creates a deep pool of activity. Our view as readers isn’t limited to a single POV, so we can choose each view. Citadel City pulses and breathes, it’s a stellar coral reef, inviting us as readers to stop and watch the aquarium contained within the page.

I really just sit and stare. It feels like reading a Sunday page comics section. But it’s all one artist, all one story. Sorta Quimby the Mouse, over-sized Acme Novelty Library in that way, if you will. Multiforce has that level of visual complexity. I am overwhelmed by that information and then drawn in by the playfulness of the story. (And contrary to some critical readings of Brinkman, there is story in spades. I’m so tired of folks saying Fort Thunder artists didn’t tell stories.) I’m freely moving my eye around the page like I am looking at an abstract painting. And what happens is I spy a simple gag cartoon that is embedded within the flow of the story, like the gag might just float free, panel-less beneath a larger grid. These vignettes, these parallel lines of thought and narrative reinforce each other and allow the story to breathe. It all moves forward, spinning in time like a living breathing world. LOOK:

The other thing for me is that this “serial Sunday page” comic speaks to me because it’s of my time, of my generation. It speaks to me more than Herriman, or Gould, or Crane for that matter. I think it’s a testament to Brinkman’s insight as a cartoonist of his time that he chose to do large format serialized comics at the moment in comics history right before all these reprint books of old serial strips are being published. He’s plugged in to the vibe, man. He, like Ware, wrestled the large format back from the dustbin of history and brought a new energy to very specific compositional and narrative “strategies” that have been laying dormant in contemporary comics for decades. I swear it reads like a multi-track recording, a harmony, some way of composing and executing that reinforces the story and, for the last time, spirals the narrative upon itself. I find it unbelievably sublime and appealing to read.

And everyone knows that the spiral contains all of the possible geometrical formations, right? So this is no pudding-school comic. The pieces of the multifaceted storyline grow together and create a life of their own. The web that’s fastened is a solid structure, a jewel that reflects each point of the story as it turns. Like some galaxy contained in an aquarium, Multiforce vibrates beyond the comic book page. Mat Brinkman may be the spiral architect of this generation of cartoonists.

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LISTEN TO THE LOUIS ARMSTRONG BIRTHDAY BROADCAST TODAY OVER AT WKCR FROM NEW YORK CITY!
also available on itunes.

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Grant Morrison doesn’t really need the attention of Comics Comics, but I’m due for a post and his two most recent books are rolling around in my head. To start with, I ought to note that until his recent All-Star Superman, which I loved, I hadn’t found a lot of his work too interesting. I liked Animal Man but found The Invisibles, The Filth, etc. etc. more or less incomprehensible. But I have always been impressed with the sheer verve of the guy, and his uniquely British ability to become a “personality” as much as a writer. It’s that Michael Moorcock thing. Gotta love it.

He seems at his best when taking everything he knows and distilling it down into a seemingly straightforward story. He is also saddled with the unfortunate disadvantage of often pretty lousy artwork, placing undo emphasis on his dialogue and ideas. With Frank Quitely he actually has an equal collaborator. Quitely’s nuanced, beautifully composed drawings actually convey meaning. This allows Morrison to shut up and let the pictures tell some of the story. Y’know, cause they’re comics and all. Their recent Batman collaboration is a perfect example of brilliant superhero comics.

Anyhow… really what I’ve meant to write about is Batman R.I.P. and Batman: The Black Casebook. I read R.I.P. and could basically understand the idea of it: Morrison’s Batman has experienced the last 60 years of comic book adventures in just 15 years of “his” time. And this becomes impossible for his brain to process. A villain tips him over the edge into insanity and he develops a second personality to cope. Then there are fights and he disappears. It’s a tough slog. The main problem is that the artwork by Tony Daniel adds nothing to the story: no character development, no set pieces — just gritted teeth and stiff action. It’s so funny — after all this time people kinda forget that comics are best when word and image complement each other. Morrison has spun this elaborate tale, but Daniel can’t bring it to life. Batman’s anguish is never manifested in a visually compelling manner. Nor is his madness. It’s all drawn in the same high-energy, hyper-scratchy, distorted manner. The colors never change, etc etc. Basically, nothing the comics does well is harnessed to tell the story. So, while I get the feeling Morrison must intend more for his stories –I mean, the clarity and depth of his work with Quitely in Superman and Batman is just stunning and in such sharp contrast to his other work.

The most interesting part of R.I.P. is its oddball spin-off: The Black Casebook. It’s a modest 144 page trade paperback — flat colors printed on off-white newsprint — filled with reprints of the stories Morrison used as research for Batman’s history in R.I.P. He focused on the most outlandish of the 1950s comics, replete with atomic fear, aliens, personality switches, and anxiety. It’s a wonderful book in a lot of ways (OK, the cover design is bad, but I’ll live) and I love the idea that Morrison treats the “off-model” history of a character/property as canonical. He simultaneously re-jiggered the history of the property by bringing those stories back into print and also treats the “mythology” seriously, under the kind of charming assumption that everything written is admissible.

And then, as a project it’s the first time I’ve seen an “artist’s choice” project with a popular super hero since the Spiegelman/Kidd Plastic Man/Cole book. It’s great to see just a slice of Batman viewed through the eyes of clever writer — I’d love to have see another writer or artist take a crack at this kind of historical project. Bringing that level of subjectivity to the topic and treating as part of an ongoing creative process is pretty fun. Plus, of course the work inside the book is fantastic. Many of the stories are written by Bill Finger, who really can’t be lionized enough as a comic book writer, and drawn by Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff. Sprang’s angularity and grotequeries make him a little stronger than Moldoff, but just by a hair. They’re both fantastic artists and crisp, clear storytellers. So go check it out — Like D&Q’s recent Melvin Monster, The Black Casebook is a lesson in the complex art of deceptively simple comic book storytelling.

Is this a pretty lightweight post? Yep, I think it must be summer.

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Can’t make it to a convention where I’ve got my “curated” longbox of back issues for sale? Never fear, true believer, I’ve got you covered. Hop on over to the blog where I’m currently selling some great warehouse finds. Check out what I scored the other day: Jim Starlin’s trainwreck masterpiece, The Price. I’ve also got some great Brendan McCarthy, Matt Wagner and Marshall Rogers stuff up right now. Stop on by just to read my hype up stickers! They’ll make you laff, I promise! You think I’m retarded? I say thee nay!

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Frank Santoro here again. Another “article” on color. Again, it’s just my notes, so forgive the stops and starts. Just trying to get it all down and out into the world.

Pacific Comics. Early 1980s. From what I understand, Pacific “ganged up” four or eight pages at a time on a color offset press. This was called the “grey-line” process. The black line art was photographed at 10 percent and looked grey when printed on a flexible printing plate. That plate is the surface that the colorist works on. It was a weird, slick surface to work on apparently. The usual paints and markers wouldn’t stick to it—they would just streak—so a lot of people making color comics for Pacific relied heavily on airbrush.

The other thing to remember with the Pacific books is that the color art plate to be shot for the camera was the same size as the printed comic. Meaning the color art was made at a one-to-one ratio where the drawings were made at usually one-and-one-half times the final printed size. This was standard practice in most four-color books but because the drum scanner for the grey-line picked up every little nuance of tone, I think about the color being made by hand instead of a screen. The colorist’s “hand” is very noticeable also because of the full color “color xerox” quality of the printing then. They reinforce each other. The printing isn’t bad; it isn’t bright, just subdued. Cheap. The colorist’s streaky markers and weird concoctions are all THERE, almost like a instrument played through an old fuzzy microphone. So the high notes and low bass parts “ring” louder. Buzz more. I dunno. I like it.

The Elric series, by P. Craig Russell and Michael T. Gilbert for Pacific is an spectacular feat of inventiveness. I like to think about the limitations that the printing process imposed upon the creation of the art, specifically the color art. Pacific began the series using a coloring system that I’m not familiar with—it may have been a similar process to grey-line, I don’t know. But the results were pretty bad. The inked lines of the art are muddy and the colors are streaky. By issue 3 though they began using a different process, trying to get crisper blacks, but the color was still wonky. Check out this note from the editor on the inside cover of issue 4:

Then a note in the same issue from the artist / colorist:

“Are you as impressed with the printing of issue four as I am? Pacific starting using a new camera with that book—and the colors were remarkably close to what Craig and I drew. Take a copy of Elric 1—and compare the printing to that of number 4, and you’ll be amazed at the difference from the earlier issue.”  

Whether you’re a fan of of the book or not, you’ve got to be won over by the tenacity and will of the artists and production people involved. They took the most rudimentary coloring and printing methods and found their own way to make it look good when most others at the time were satisfied with poor color reproduction in comics. Remember, this is 1983: no Photoshop, no way of “proofing” the colors really. They had to tweak each issue as it was published.

Below is an excerpt from an interview with the artist P. Craig Russell, who was one half of the team that created this particular Elric series for Pacific Comics in 1983. Check out how he describes the process of trial-and-error that led Michael T. Gilbert to literally invent a new way of coloring.

The Comics Journal #147 (Dec. 1991). Interviewed by Craig Paeth

Interviewer: This is where you developed the coloring style you have used for all your projects up until now.

P. Craig Russell: Right; I am eternally grateful to Michael T. Gilbert for that. We were coloring on photostats with the acetate overlays. To try to use watercolor on an acetate just looks terrible. Michael came in one day with a panel he’d done using frisket paper, which is what you’d usually use if you were airbrushing. You’d put this stuff over it and cut out the area you’d want to airbrush and then lift it up when you were done. It’s like a stencil type thing. Michael was airbrushing the entire sheet of frisket and would use it like you’d use zip-a-tone or a pantone sheet by placing it down on the paper and cutting around it. So we started playing around with that, and by gluing your color down you’re not streaking it onto the paper.

It was developed as a way of getting around this horrible coloring process we had, with necessity being the mother of invention. We found that you could color underneath a frisket and that a pencil eraser would erase your watercolor off the paper and you could get sort of pseudo-airbrush effects that way. It could get very complicated and by the sixth issue I really think we had it working. I think Michael did the best color work he’s ever done on those Elric issues because I’m much more meticulous and clean in my approach and I wouldn’t let him get away with sloppy utility knife work, I really kept him on his toes as far as a finished look would go.

(from Elric issue 6)

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BACK TO COMICS COMICS: And now, let’s hear from the other half of the team, specifically guy who handled the lion’s share of the art on this book. I wrote to Michael T. Gilbert and asked him a few questions about the Elric series and some of the old coloring methods like grey-line and the following is his response:

The Early Days of Comic Book Coloring, As I Remember It!
©2009 Michael T. Gilbert

I consider myself primarily a comic book artist and writer (Mr Monster, Elric, Donald Duck and crew, etc.), but over the years I have done my share of coloring. I cut my eyeteeth coloring my cover for New Paltz Comix an ” underground” comic book I self-published 1973.

I was a 21-year old college student when I brought the art to New Paltz Comix to a printer near my home on Long Island, and asked him how to color it for reproduction. He showed me how to cut frisket for a simple two-color cover (black-and-white, with various shades of blue). After placing a slab of Rubylith paper (a clear plastic sheet with a red see-through sticky plastic on top) on top of my cover art, he instructed me to cut away any areas that I wanted to remain black-and-white when they photographed it. The rest would be whatever color I’d indicated when they’d print it in. If it was to be printed blue, let’s say, I’d paint a section black (red, actually, since the red Rubylith photographed as black!). Confusing, eh? If I wanted it to be dark blue it would be 100% black, or if I used a 50% grey shading sheet on top, the final result to be a lighter 50% blue.

I didn’t fully understand what the printer was telling me, but gave it a try anyway; cutting cut away selected areas as instructed. Months later, when my comic was finally in print, I was delighted to see that it worked!

For the second issue we tried doing a fully-painted cover, which would have saved us a ton of time and looked far more professional. But having the printer photograph it turned out to be too expensive for our meager budget, so I took a stat of the uncolored cover and redid the colors with hand-seps, using multiple layers ––one for yellow, another for blue and one for red. By mixing the colors in various shades you could get all the other colors when they were printed on top of one another. The cover looked great when printed, though not as impressive as full-color.

Over the years, I did a few more covers using hand-cut colors, over the black-and-white art. It was hard, tedious work, but a fun challenge.

My most ambitious cover coloring was the one to Star*Reach Publication’s Imagine #6. I did hand-separated color (in black-and-white) on three different layers (plus the black-and-white plate) –– using airbrush! Since I was drawing the red, yellow and blue plates in black, white and grey, I had to guess how it would look when all the colors were combined. And I couldn’t afford to get printed proofs beforehand. In order to get them you’d need to have film negatives made first from each layer, and proofs made from them. Star*Reach’s shoe-string budget couldn’t afford that until the negs were shot for final printing. Luckily, I’d mostly guessed right that time, and the cover looked good overall. I breathed a sigh of relief!

Though I’d never done interior color, around 1981 I decided to give it a try. I was intrigued by the blueline method I’d seen Bil Stout use on some Slow Death covers, and decided to give it a try on one of my stories. With bluelines, the printer makes a negative of the art, somewhat larger than the printed size. Using that, a light blue image of the drawing would be printed on a stiff-but-porous sheet of cardboard. Then an identical black-and-white drawing would be printed on a transparent sheet. Once placed over the blue art, the black would cover the blue and hide it (since it was the same image, and the same size). But when the black-and-white transparency was removed temporarily for coloring, the artist could use the blue as guidelines when coloring.

I did the color for my 8-page story “The Circle Game” using Dr. Martin’s Dyes and airbrush. It was a real trial-and-error situation, and I went through a lot of paper before I was satisfied, but I learned a lot in the process –– and just in time, as it turned out! The following year I was invited to work with Craig Russell drawing and coloring the first Elric comic book series for Pacific Comics.

As Craig mentioned, we had trouble doing the color. This was in the VERY early days of full color comics and nobody at Pacific seemed to know what they were doing (though I had assumed otherwise coming in!). We only had a week or two to color the entire comic on printed size stats, which turned out to be too slick to hold the Dr. Martin’s Dyes, which would pool and turn blotchy. Desperate, I came up with a stopgap measure of making Xeroxes of the stats on porous cardboard. The colors didn’t reproduce as intensely as they would have on stat paper, but at least we were able to finish the job on time.

By the third issue I came up with the idea of spraying colors on clear frisket paper with a sticky back that would hold to the surface of the slick stats. We’d do an undercoat color on the stat, but add the colored frisket on large areas that required more subtle color. When the comics were collected into a graphic novel later, we recolored those first two issues, and the black came out sharper and the colors more intense. I later used the same frisket-on-slick-stats method when I colored some of my Mr. Monster stories a couple of years later for Eclipse.             Speaking of which, did you know that the first comic book story ever done with computer color was printed in Mr. Monster? First Publishing had done a comic called Shatter, which was allegedly the first comic drawn on a computer. It may have been drawn on a computer, but it was colored by hand, the same way as all the other comics were at the time.

My friend Steve Oliff tried to convince Eclipse to let him try coloring a story using computer color, which had never been done. I suggested that Steve could color “My Fears!,” a four-page story drawn by Jeff Bonivert, as a backup in Mr. Monster #5 (February 1986). In my typical cheesy manner, I christened our experiment “Terror-Chroma!” Brrr! The results were dark and murky, but it worked. Good thing too, because we were pretty nervous about this newfangled “computer-color” stuff.

In more recent years I’ve learned to do computer color myself, most recently on my new G5 iMac. Getting the hang of Photoshop was a huge learning curve, but now I’m doing things I could only have dreamed in the old days. The frisket colors I employed on the old Elric comics were clumsy and very time consuming, though the results were often impressive. Today I can do the same thing better in minutes using layers of color –– and change the color instantly with the click of a mouse. Moreover, I can instantly see how the final colors will look on my computer screen, and even make printouts on my laser printer.

Coloring is a whole new world today –– and I like it. I don’t always care for the overuse and over-saturation of modern computer coloring, but that’s the fault of the colorists, not the medium.

When I think back, it’s been a long strange trip, from Rubylith to Photoshop CS3.

But it’s certainly been a very colorful journey!

The End
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‘Nuff said. Well, true believer, please understand that I’m just trying to understand these processes myself. My friend and mentor, Norman Hathaway makes fun of me all the time about this stuff. He tells me I gotta look outside of comics to understand the processes better. That I’ll find more of the information I’m looking for if I begin to wrap my head around the idea that these processes were used in commercial printing as affordable ways of proofing colors before expensive plates were made. In comics this cheap “proofing” method was the actual printing method. Hunh? You still with me, faithful reader? No? All right, well, stay tuned for future “articles” on color and we may just figure this out yet.