Balloon & Panel: Colors in comics establish themes, alter perception
Mike Mignola’s comic “Hellboy,” which tells the story of a half-demon secret agent, was colored by Dave Stewart, who uses shadows to cover the page with rich, deep black colors. (Courtesy of Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart)
By Joshua Greenberg
March 4, 2015 1:41 a.m.
Comic books are everywhere – Marvel and DC Comics are mining decades of story lines for a huge slate of movies and television shows. But comics are more than a source to be mined for superhero blockbusters. New creators are dealing with issues every month in ways that couldn’t be done in other formats – issues of comic books. These aren’t black-and-white issues. They’re in color.
Color in comics has the ability to heighten reality, making everything from the characters to the plot look and feel in a way that accentuates the ideas.
It’s one of the most striking things that comics can do – make events seem realer than real, pushing that extra mile in establishing the mood. Color palettes establish the theme of a scene – it’d be weird if a guy got stabbed in pastel. Tonally, even black-and-white comics have to think about shadows – inking is like coloring but in only one color.
When a prose novel like “The Great Gatsby” describes the yellow of decay or the green of money, these represent symbols in the novel but they aren’t really visible. In comics, you are actually seeing the green of decay or the yellow of Scrooge McDuck’s gold pile. It’s a visceral reaction.
Black-and-white comics can’t ever fully replicate that effect – they can be great, but they’re hobbled by that element.
It’s really rare to think about color unless it’s either screwed up or really well done. Generally, it’s done to supplement the line work, but lately, it’s become a key part of the storytelling.
It’s amazing what a jump in quality color seems to bring. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie created “Phonogram” in 2006, about a music wizard attempting to stop the cursed revival of Britpop, in full black and white. In their later collaborations, they added Matt Wilson as a colorist, and in “Phonogram: The Singles Club” and “The Wicked + The Divine,” color is an essential element.
“The Wicked + the Divine” is about a world where gods reincarnate for two years every 90 years as pop musicians, and a fan falls in love with them. Baal resembles Kanye West, and Woden is the guy from “Daft Punk.” In scenes of partying and magic, the colors add an essential element of unreality to the proceedings, making it one of the slickest-looking comics this year. Color is a substitute for music.
The strongest tool in a monochrome comic’s arsenal is the ability to show really stark contrasts between the blacks and whites. Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy,” which is about a half-demon secret agent with a stone hand that could end the world, is in color, but at times, it seems like it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t. That’s the trick colorist Dave Stewart pulls off. He knows when to stay out of the way with muted greys and when to bust in with bright bloody red. The shadows in “Hellboy” are the real star – it looks like a midnight Gothic cathedral with rich, deep blacks that often cover half the page. But for most stories, black and white doesn’t hold up in comparison to the finished product.
Old comics used a manual process that resulted in very limited palettes. The color of a blue sky is the same as the color of a character’s eyes or a blue car. These “four color” comics mixed shades of cyan, magenta, yellow and black to make all colors, like your color printer does today. They were making the most of their printing technology, but I wonder if the limited array of colors affected their ability to tell more complex stories. Does working in pulp make your work tend toward pulp?
Digital coloring in comics started in the mid-1990s. While digital coloring can be used to make awful, unnatural colors, it can also create subtle variations in ways that the old mechanisms couldn’t.
Recently, a number of reprints of older comics were recolored digitally to fit with modern tastes. But recoloring changes the comic, and not always for the better. It’s in those reprints that the worst, gradient-filled excesses of the ’90s are still at work. Reprints of Alan Moore’s “Miracleman,” which credits him as “The Original Writer,” and his “Batman: The Killing Joke” alter the tone of the original. “The Killing Joke” had a fluorescent, insane feel to it, appropriate for the iconic Joker story. The newer colors, done by artist Brian Bolland, are more realistic, but lose the garishness. They suck the life out of the comic. Collections of “Watchmen” wisely avoided such shenanigans. Bad colors and inks can ruin an otherwise good comic, proving just how important color is.
Color is the element that keeps the reader from noticing the subtle failures, the weird choices in the art and other inevitable things. When it’s done superbly, when readers notice that the color isn’t just corresponding to the physical objects it’s depicting, but also working with the art and the writing to make the plot and themes clearer, that’s good color. It’s something that can’t be seen in black and white.
– Josh Greenberg
What’s your favorite colored comic? Email Greenberg at [email protected]
