Recoloring old comics

Media Outlet Comic Book Forum
1

I was at B&N today and came across the new reissues of The Sandman TPBs. New covers, plus newly recolored artwork. I am not an enormous fan of modern coloring techniques (they look all airbrushed and computer-y), so I was skeptical. I flipped through Preludes and Nocturnes, and I have to admit that the new coloring did make the artwork look better.

That is, of course, because I never liked the artwork in the first place. The updated colors, rather than improving the existing qualities of the line art, are covering for the deficiencies. I think the art in the oldest of the Sandman stories is a little slapdash, at least partly because Gaiman’s mythology–even in its infancy–caught the artists unprepared. Nobody knew how to illustrate it.

This got me thinking about the trend of recoloring comics that have strong artwork to begin with. Batman: Year One is a good example. Sure, Richmond Lewis did an impeccable job of repainting the existing line art, but was it really necessary? Comics do more than just tell a story. They document the time and technology that produced them. There’s something to be said for a good comic that makes specific use of the available tools, and Year One is no exception. The original color palette reminds me of the first comics I ever owned.

What’s the impetus? Do readers buy something more than once if they think they’re getting a new-and-improved version? Is it an effort to preserve the freshness of the stories, to keep them from looking dated? In the case of the computer-colored Sandman reissues, I get the feeling that they’re going to look dated all over again in a decade or two, so they might as well look dated in the time period that they’re from.

If the powers that be insist on doing this shit, I suggest going the route of Absolute Watchmen. Repaint the artwork using the colors that are already there. Make them richer and more vivid, and correct any errors due to the outmoded printing processes, but otherwise leave them alone. Have confidence in the original choices.

I’m basically just bitching.

2

I’m 50/50 on the matter. Re-coloring and whatnot is cool and all, but I love the retro feel and the aged look to old-school comics. Really makes me feel like I’m holding a piece of comic history.

3

The new Sandman paperback recoloring job is what they did when they made the Absolute Sandman volumes. I looked at them, too, and I think they are an improvement. The colors are just more pleasing to me, and I don’t think that they are egregiously computery compared to other comics I’ve seen.

I also have no problem with the recoloring job Richmond Lewis did for Year One. I think the original colors for a lot of older comics look garish when reprinted accurately on higher-quality paper. There’s something about the old newsprint paper that soaked up that color, and dulled it.

A lot of those old '70s and '80s comics have pretty decent coloring when you look at the actual comic book issue. Look at some of the comics in the Marvel Masterworks series. They use the original coloring, basically “remastering” (whatever that means) them for maximum accuracy. When they get reprinted today on glossy paper, they are often accurate to the originals but I don’t think they look as good. There’s a lot of weird color choices that stand out, like coloring entire crowds of people purple and stuff. I respect that they want to be accurate to the original work, but in those instances, I think the original work wasn’t as good as it could have been. That’s why I have no problem with recoloring old comics as long as it’s an obvious improvement.

With Sandman, I don’t think the coloring is what’s going to make it look dated. If anything, it’s going to be the character designs and actual linework of the art.

I enjoy the feeling of holding something in my hands that sort of encapsulates a particular era of comics history but, to me, that’s not usually more important to me than enjoying a piece of work. Maybe I’m not a purist because I’d rather have something I like more than something that hasn’t been altered.

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I think it’s a case by case scenario.

For reprints of Disney Carl Barks comics recoloring has been the standard since I’ve been reading comics. I obviously have no idea how they hold up to the originals but to me his stories were always more entertaining than his artwork.

I always wondered why they never went they extra mile and made Donald Duck and his nephews clothes their appropriate colors instead of having them black which is really a hold over from the daily black and white comic strips where they used black to hold the reader’s attention but eh. The stories are more important.

Over the years I’ve seen some pretty strange effects for these Donald Duck / Uncle Scrooge recolorings. Such as airbrushing techniques when the originals obviously didn’t have that. This mostly happened on covers though. For the most part it just looked bizarre. But eh no big I guess.

For the old E.C. Segar reprints of Thimble Theater, AKA Popeye they try their best to match the original colors of the Sunday strips. Once again, not having been born when those comics came out I have no idea what has been changed, but they say they have tried their best to make it look like the originals so I’ll take their word for it and leave it at that. The strips look good in color and I get to pretend that I was around way back when to read them in the Sunday paper.

Comics, hmm. A lot of comics from the '70s on down have bad coloring jobs due to the process that was used for coloring books back then. Women used to stencil the colors in and received no credit and very little pay. They probably didn’t even care about what they were doing and just wanted to earn an extra check. I do not mean to insult them of course because hey they are still part of the history of the industry and I think everyone should be credited for everything they do no matter what. Still the process at times worked against good coloring.

Mistakes happened all of the time. A funny tidbit about DC, they made the Silver Age’s Green Lantern’s power not work on yellow. At the time they thought that it was a brilliant idea. The problem with that is that green and yellow were often confused with each other in the coloring process.

From things I’ve heard over the years, it was really difficult to tell these female colorists what to do. I heard a story about someone having an Asian character as a lead for a cowboy comic book series. They kept coloring his eyes blue. The artist kept arguing with them not to do that because the character didn’t have blue eyes but the colorists stuck to their guns and kept saying that the hero of the story always has blue eyes. So for whatever reason he was stuck with a blue eyed Asian cowboy.

So yeah, I definitely think there are things that can be fixed and improved if time and the conditions allow for it. I don’t think it’s a big issue either way.

Coloring comics that were originally black and white is a big can of worms and really depends on the work.

Some people know how to use blacks when they don’t have color to move your eyes around the page along with playing around with inking techniques and line weight. Some people don’t and everything has one line and there’s hardly any blacks at all. For the later when you color it you actually improve the work (see the vast majority of Ameri-manga where a lot of people have no idea how to ink in either Japanese style of American style). However if you start coloring things that were intended for black and white you may harm it. Possibly, it depends on the colorist and their knowledge and use of color theory.

It’s like recoloring old black and white movies. No one knows what the actual colors were for everything used back when the films were made so now they have to apply color theory to everything. If they use it too much which they often did, everything looks surreal. If they use to little, it looks like they are not even trying. It’s a difficult balancing act to say the least.

5

Coloring comics that were originally black and white works very effectively if the original creator gives the colorist his blessing. Look at Bone. It’s one of the greatest comics ever, whether you read it in black and white or in color. That’s more of a testament to the masterful storytelling and craftiness of the original art than a comment on the actual coloring process, but still.

It works the other way, too. Some comics that were originally in color can look better in black and white. I think some of the stuff in Marvel’s Essentials books shows that to be true.

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There’s a strong analogy here, I think. It is generally thought among film buffs that black and white films do not need to and should not be colorized. There is the issue that they are representative of the time and technology that made them. But there’s also the issue that the visual elements were chosen, composed, lit, and shot specifically for black, white, and gray tones. Color cinematography is a whole other ball game. Colorization, even with a well-chosen palette, often amounts to slapping color on a perfectly fine black and white image and calling it good.

Consider this: everybody has heard the famous story that Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for blood in the movie Psycho. Not many realize that it’s partly because brown, when photographed in black and white, looks redder than red itself does. Red, when photographed in black and white, tends to come across as pale gray. These are the kinds of choices that specifically makes it a black and white film–not just a film that happens to lack the technological advantage of color.

I tend to think along the same lines as Sano when it comes to the colorization of black and white comics. It varies, but–as with movies–some artists draw specifically for black and white. Adding color often ends up subtracting from the art.

David Lloyd’s artwork in V For Vendetta is a good example. It was drawn specifically to take advantage of the strict black and white scheme. The added color sucks the power out of the white space. I often find myself squinting while reading V For Vendetta, because the art looks too dim.

7

trades have to deal with different paper quality, and the process of how the pages were reproduced in the first place. both of these factors affect coloring and line work, so revisiting those are sometimes necessary