GGersten sent some follow-up questions after my post on comic book coloring…
Your post caused me to look up when Tatjana Wood was, seemingly, the primary DC colorist. I did not know Tatjana Wood was married to Wally Wood. I recalled (then) Glynis Wein as a colorist at the time as well in the 1970s. Were these spousal connections common? Besides Ms. Severin, Wood and Wein were the colorists whose names I noticed or recalled.
I also recall reading that colorists at the time didn't color so much as indicate percentages of the printing colors — like mixing paint — which, to me, sounded a whole lot tougher than simply coloring in the pencils and inks.
My memory of the early 70s was that DC books seemed brighter and Marvel books were darker or even a bit muddy. Perhaps this was due to different printing processes?
Lastly, the Marvel Essentials and DC Showcase collections are not in color. Are they reprinting from the pencils/inks or is color being removed? This last question may be outside your knowledge.
Tatjana Wood (ex-wife of Wally) was a prolific DC colorist but I don't think she was ever the primary one. For a long time, Jack Adler was the main guy in that capacity and he colored most of the covers and a lot of insides. There was a long period there when Jerry Serpe colored more interiors than anyone else.
Nepotism was not uncommon in any corner of the comic book business but it was probably most visible in the coloring division. A lot of spouses and siblings and offspring colored comics and some of them were pretty good. Some older artists became colorists when their eyes or motor skills prevented them from penciling or inking.
Yes, once upon a time, colorists indicated codes and percentages on their pages. They were coloring stats but not to be used for direct reproduction. Printing was done on a four-color press — red, blue, yellow and black. The black plate was made off the black-and-white artwork but the other plates were hand-cut. So for instance for the red plate, someone would define the areas that should be 100% red, 50% red, etc. The coloring that was done by a Marie Severin or a Jerry Serpe would be a guide to the separator as to how the color areas should be placed and in what percentages. A certain green, for instance, might be achieved by printing 50% blue and 50% yellow over a given area. (I am obviously way oversimplifying here.)
During the seventies, DC and Marvel comics were separated and printed via the same outside companies. If you noticed a difference in the coloring between companies, that was probably just different approaches by the folks in charge. I thought the Marvel books usually looked more colorful.
Most comic book art starts with a black-line image and when they reprint comics, DC and Marvel go to their files for black-and-white stats or film and the process starts like that. The files are not complete and if a desired issue is missing, they may have to re-create the black-and-white art via one of several ways. Filtering the coloring out of a printed page is one way. (If the reprint is in color, they may scan a printed comic and tweak the colors.) Most of the pages in those Essentials and Showcase volumes are shot off stats or film of the artwork made at the time the material first went through production.
Anything else anybody wants to know about this? And keep in mind that since comics went from being colored and color-separated by hand to having all that done by computer, the whole process has changed a lot.
