Retro Coloring 03: Reggie and Me #25 Color Guide, pt 1

 Color guides are a type of original art created in the production of comic books. They are one-of-a-kind creations with hand work by the Colorist. To be honest, they're not very collectable, at least not when compared to the original art. But that's also part of their charm. For instance, the 6 pages I'm presenting here only cost about $88. Not bad for something created about 54 years ago!

However, I have seen some color guides go for very high figures, especially for covers. If you decide to look into it, you should expect to pay about $50 a page for most comics, more for mainstream superheroes like Superman and Batman. Honestly, you could see $200+ a page for those, and if it's a famous story, multiply that by whatever the seller wants. I recently saw the cover color guide for Amethyst, Princess of Gem World #1 listed at $1,999.

Reggie and Me #25, 

I think Archie is a great place to start with color guides. The colors are simple, straightforward and do not include a lot of special instructions. So, without further ado, here it is. (Note, the copies are on what feels like regular paper; it's kind of thin and definitely shows a little "bubbling" from the application of wet dyes (and you can see the ink stains on the third page. There is an odd, brownish border to the pages, which are about the size of the printed book.)

Credits:

• Script: Frank Doyle
• Pencils: Al Hartley
• Inks: Jon D'Agostino
• Colors: (attributed to) Barry Grossman
• Letters: Jon D'Agostino

© 1967 Archie Comics

NOTE: This color guide is presented for the scholarly purpose of discussing how comics were colored in the past. Its fair-use inclusion here recognizes that the underlying story and artwork are the copyrighted property of Archie Comics.

By the way, if you have sharp eyes, you'll notice that page 26 is missing. That page was an ad, so it's not part of the story. Want to read the whole printed comic? Check it out here: https://viewcomics.me/reggie-and-me-1966/issue-25

Next up: Retro Coloring 04: Reggie and Me #25 Color Guide, pt 2

Retro Coloring 02: Color Guides

When talking about coloring comics, it's easy to forget something that was once very obvious: Coloring comics was a two-step process performed by two different people:

1. The Colorist decided what colors went where. This person's job was to start with a stat (later photocopy) of the black & white artwork and then, using special dyes, paint the desired colors where they go. Afterwards, the colorist would hand write color codes on the art. (For more info on this, read last week's blog and don't forget to read "How to Color Comics the Marvel Way" from Marvel Age #13: https://viewcomics.me/marvel-age/issue-13/22.) The finished Color Guide was then handed off to the next person...
2. The Separator took the Color Guide and then used a variety of physical tools and media (mostly acetate (thin plastic sheets) and cutting and pasting them where they go based on the color formulas provided by the colorist. This was a physical job that was often done by women (at least by the 1960s) and the accuracy with which the separator followed the colorist's guidance was kind of hit-or-miss. By that, I mean that the better comic shops got (and paid for) separators who did at least a workman-level job. They usually got it right, but sometimes (especially on tight deadlines), you'd see color get missed or messed up. But the cheap shops had a lot of problems.

I'm trying to track down some good videos on the physical part of color separations. If I find any, I'll link to them. This one is a good discussion about modern recoloring, and it has a few pics of the separation process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNYDiJibRM4.

Color separation is now handled digitally with computers (unless you're working with some old-school print-making equipment). So we're not going to focus on that aspect of the process. Instead, we're going to look at some Color Guides.

Color Guides

As I said, a Color Guide starts off as a black & white copy of the black line art. The colorist then paints in each color with special dyes (again, that Marvel Age article covers all that jazz) and then makes up the page with the associated codes that relate to the chart published in last week's entry.

Here's what a simple color guide looks like:

Reggie and Me #25 (Aug 1967)

The colors in this guide are attributed to Barry Grossman (by that, I mean most Archie scholars agree that is probably who colored this; it looks like his work and that was his job at the time).

Here's a scan of the printed page so you can compare the two:

Want to read the whole printed comic? Check it out here: 

https://viewcomics.me/reggie-and-me-1966/issue-25

Next up: Retro Coloring 03: Reggie and Me #25 Color Guide, pt 1

Retro Coloring - 01: Overview

I have started looking into classic comic book coloring techniques based on the traditional 64-color palette of 64 colors. Specifically, I'm looking at using the old color codes with modern tools that can recreate those effects in Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, skip to the end for some links that explain how comics were color coded for separation using the CMYK color process.) 

Now, before I dive into this series of articles, I'm going to get snippy. I'm not talking about using some cheesy Photoshop filter to emulate a grainy halftone on your comic art. That's all nice and fun for what it is, but unless you are using the correct, limited color scheme based on the actual 64 colors made from the CMYK progress, the results of your little filter and action are going to look fake. There's nothing wrong with that; if that's what you like, go for it. It's faster than doing it this way and you'll get a much wider ranger of colors than is possible from this old-school, retro coloring process that was used to color comics from the 1930s through the 1980s and early 1990s. Near the end of the 1990s, presses and paper made it possible to expand the color gamut and get more.

Before I get into the modern tools, you need a little background.

64-Colors for Super Comics

I'm not going to go into the full details of how this process works; there are simply too many good other resources available that explain it in detail. One thing you're going to need to understand is that the names of the color channels don't exactly line up with the color codes. 

As stated above, printing is done with four traditional printing plates: Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black (represented by the letters, CMYK). In traditional comics, Black is used only for the black lines: it is NOT used in colors (this changed in the 1990s, but for now we're going to ignore it). If you're uncertain, here's the colors in their raw forms:

Cyan is a light blue

Yellow is yellow

Maginta is a shade of pink

Unfortunately, Color Codes (which were hand-painted onto copies of the black & white artwork as guides for the men and women who did the actual coloring), did not reference CMYK. Color codes use BYR for Blue, Yellow and Red. 

Yeah, it's confusing, but they did it that way for 50+ years, so it must not have been too weird.

Nevertheless, here are a few details, pulled from the article, "How to Color Comics the Marvel Way" from Marvel Age #13 by Mark Lerer (link to article at end of this post):

"Comic books are printed in the sixty-four combinations of red, blue, yellow and their lighter shades shown here in the printer's color chart. The notation may be a little confusing. R means a solid, or "100% screen" of red [magenta]. Likewise, B means a "100% screen" of blue [cyan], and Y means a "100% screen" of Yellow. "Y2" means a 25% screen of yellow, which makes a very light yellow shade, and "Y3" means a 50% screen of yellow which makes up the intermediate yellow shade. Similarly for R2, R3, B2 and B3. Every color on the chart is a combination of these shades. For example, solid green is YB, a 100% yellow combined with a 100% blue. R3B2, a reddish purple, is a 50% red screen combined with a 25% blue screen."

Here's a copy of a traditional color chart from Marvel Age #13:

As I said, I'm not going to try to make full sense of this. Go check out the following resources for more info.

Other Resources

The basics of old-school coloring:

https://kleinletters.com/Blog/more-on-coloring-old-school/

An article about the physical act of creating color separations. This is a fantastic article that has a lot of detail about the way Marvel Comics were separated:

https://www.eliotrbrown.com/wp/marvel-behind-the-scenes-beyond-the-behind-chemical-color-plate/

Fun to watch, but not really informative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiITySqmjsg&t=191s

And the super-important "How to Color Comics the Marvel Way" from Marvel Age #13:
https://viewcomics.me/marvel-age/issue-13/22

Next up: Retro Coloring 02: Color Guides