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:
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:
Fun to watch, but not really informative.
And the super-important "How to Color Comics the Marvel Way" from Marvel Age #13:
https://viewcomics.me/marvel-age/issue-13/22
https://viewcomics.me/marvel-age/issue-13/22
Next up: Retro Coloring 02: Color Guides
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