I'm sorry to say it's a Two Obits Day here at newsfromme.com.
Jerry Serpe, who may hold some record for the most comic books colored, died Monday in Florida. Serpe was a longtime employee of DC Comics, dating from the mid-forties. Before that, he worked for a company called Photochrome that handled coloring and color separation work on many of DC's publications, and when Photochrome went out of business, he and a man named Jack Adler moved over to work for DC.
Serpe colored thousands of comic books — issues of everything the company published during his tenure, and also did extensive production work, including art corrections and touch-ups. Few knew his name but every DC reader saw his handiwork and he even occasionally did a bit of artwork for public service or filler pages that ran in the company's books. For an extended period through the fifties and sixties, Adler was primarily in charge of the coloring of covers while Serpe supervised (and often, did) the coloring of the insides. For much of this time, DC did the color separations for the covers in-house, and Serpe did much of this work, as well.
In the late sixties, DC stopped doing color seps in-house and scaled back that department. Serpe seized on a fortuitous pension opportunity to leave the company. Thereafter, he ran an outside printing business and occasionally freelanced for DC. Eventually, he sold his interest in the printing company and began doing more freelance coloring but during the eighties, with so many new colorists entering the business, the available work declined.
Around that time, I was doing Blackhawk for DC with artist Dan Spiegle, and we had to pick a new colorist for the book. Several young and talented folks were suggested and even recommended but Dan was not always happy with the current trends in comic book coloring. I suggested he look through his pile of recent printed comics and see which coloring his work had received that pleased him. He did, deciding that a certain Sgt. Rock Annual had been tinted to his liking. It ran with no coloring credit so I called up Bob Rozakis, who was then in charge of DC's coloring department and told him, "Look that one up. Whoever colored it…that's the person we want." Bob checked the files and was delighted to find it was not one of the new kids but an old pro — Jerry Serpe, who wasn't doing much for the company by then.
Jerry colored the remaining issues of Blackhawk and did a fine job. When he got the gig, he called me up to say thanks. He was especially pleased that he'd won a "blind taste test" and been hired on nothing more than the merits of his work. And why not? It was always good.
[NOTE: I did a rewrite on this piece at 4:15 PM to correct some facts and add some details. Sadly, not a whole lot has ever been written about guys like Jerry Serpe so it's uncharted territory. Thanks to Paul Levitz for some info.]