Praise for the Journeyman Colorist

In Episode #949 of the iFanboy podcast, Josh and Conor answered this email from a listener:

Hoping for a little praise for the journeyman. Who is the first colorist that you ever took note of? How about letterer? Editor?

I like to occasionally steal questions from their show to answer here, so here we go.

I had to chime in on this one because I had an answer for the colorist part of the question right away. It’s always seemed weird to me just how quickly he was completely forgotten. Here’s my chance to remind people! What good is having your own website if not for moments like this?!?

First, Josh and Conor are right that a lot of comics looked alike in the pre-computer world of coloring. They had an extremely limited set of colors to work with, and even then the separators (in Ireland, as I recall, for Marvel) could do just about anything with them. And, sadly often, did.

Plus, the newsprint soaked everything up, making much of the coloring dull and dark.

Josh and Conor came up with the same colorist for their answer: Laura DePuy (now Martin). She was an early computer colorist with a distinct style, as seen in the pages of “Planetary” and “Authority”. She’d color entire scenes with a specific color tone to help set them apart from the rest of the issue. You can flip through an issue of those two titles and see a color script, much like animated movies have. The pages are awash with color. It’s beautiful stuff, but it’s not the first I paid attention to.

My First Noted Colorist

My answer goes further back to pre-computer times.

It’s not Brian Murray, who colored “X-Force” #4 in a way that stood out from everything on the stand. We learned from Rob Liefeld’s podcast that that was in part due to a printing error. (I can’t find that episode of Robservations. If you know it, leave a comment and I’ll link it up.)

Nor is it Barry Windsor-Smith, whose coloring on his “Weapon X” serial in “Marvel Comics Presents” is memorable, but not repeated.

I went to Jim Lee’s “The Uncanny X-Men” run. The first comic book colorist that I took note of and looked for was Joe Rosas. He did more intricate color and shadow work than anyone else in the Marvel and DC books I was reading. The kind of work he did was over-the-top for a pre-Photoshop comics world.

He also used brighter colors, throwing purples and greens and yellows and pinks around to liven up the pages. There were pages where his attention to detail made it look like he was modeling with color long before Photoshop made that truly possible.

The issue I took the example above from (“The Uncanny X-Men” #272) is credited to both Joe Rosas and Glynis Oliver. I’m willing to bet that Rosas did this particular page. That purple zig-zag background and the highlights on Wolverine’s front legs, hands, and shoulder are what do it for me. Oliver’s pages are well-crafted with a palette that withstands newsprint well, but look flat, relatively speaking. The shadows and highlights are far fewer.

It’s not that other colorists didn’t add shadows and highlights, but Rosa’s style also meshed with Lee’s art so well, and his color choices were bright and palpable. It felt very west coast to me, at the time, which was fitting given Lee’s location in La Jolla, California. Everything just looked sun-kissed. Faces were bright with pink shadows and yellow/white highlights. Uniforms had a subtle shine on them for the same reasons.

Check out Jubilee’s face in this panel from “The Uncanny X-Men” #276 for a small, but representative, sample of the style. He uses that pink to create a shadow along the right side of her face instead of some darker color. He also adds a very pale almost white color along the opposite side of her face to indicate the light source. You can also see some shadow work falling under her nose and eyebrows. The yellow on the shoulder of her costume highlights that area, as well.

He would cut out small triangular areas to create depth with shadows and highlights. Look at his faces and see the subtle work he did putting the shadow next to a nose. The muzzle flash of a laser gun throws yellow highlight slivers to the protruding muscles in the area.

Look at this detail from the classic Gambit/Jubilee splash page of “The Uncanny X-Men” #276. That’s some dramatic uplighting. See the detail in the reflection on her glasses? Look at the multiple levels of light on the blue in her uniform. Her legs have dark colors, middle colors, and highlight colors. Rosas added three different colors on someone’s legs in a superhero costume. And the color sections didn’t just stick to the black line work. He added highlights where the muscles would be protruding out the most.

Tangent: I see a lot of Michael Golden’s influence on Lee’s art here. It’s interesting to look back at the art in comics from my earliest days of reading them, 35 years later, and be able to see the strong influences on those artists. This is my subtle way of saying I’m experienced and knowledgeable, not old.

A Color Guide Example

I found this color guide that Rosas did for a page in X-Men #2, which shows the limitations he had to work within. The color guide is beautiful and I can easily see it being used today with some computer wizardry to be the final colors. By the time the page went through the process and landed in print, though, all of his subtleties were lost.

Look at how much flatter the final page looks. Rogue’s jacket nearly blends in with the road. Orange-brown colors on the rubble in the lower right are replaced with the same purple/gray hue that smothers everything else in the area. Rogue’s white hair is colored in blue. The purple on Magneto’s cape is much darker, but it’s consistent with the purple of Wolverine and Cyclops in front of him, so maybe that’s how it was intended with the color guide values.

Nope. I just looked at a color chart from the time. Rosa’s indicates R3B2, but the printed edition looks more like maybe RB2 or plain old RB.

If you’ve never seen a manual color guide before, Todd Klein explains color guides here and includes some samples.

Beyond X-Men

Rosas did this style not just with Jim Lee. He was also the colorist of the “Wonder Man” series when it kicked off, and he used similar coloring tricks to make that book look as good as it did. It showed up better on those pages just because they were so much brighter. The early Jeff Johnson artwork inked by the great Terry Austin was particularly memorable.

The series was also set in Los Angeles, so that “West Coast” look I referred to earlier came in handy!

Joe Rosas was the first colorist I took note of and recognized instantly when he was on a book. I don’t see much of anything in the way of credits for him after 2001. Most of his career was spent at Marvel, with a decent run on X-Men, plus credits on series such as “Silver Sable and the Wild Pack,” “The New Warriors,” “Peter Parker: Spider-Man,” “Thunderbolts,” and more. He disappeared after that. I wonder if he just never made the transition to digital coloring. Or maybe he found another more profitable career path?

The Others

As for letterers, I had to think harder about that. Tom Orzechowski immediately comes to mind. I could tell the wild difference in how “The Uncanny X-Men” looked based on whether he lettered it or not.

But I also recognized Chris Eliopoulos’ style early on because it seemed like he was doing so many of the books I was reading, and his style was just different enough to be easily recognizable to me.

I don’t think I read anything Todd Klein did in my earliest years of reading comics. I knew his name from winning umpteen million awards, but I wasn’t reading any of those books.

Editor? There were names I recognized, but not that I followed. Editors are often hit and miss, and it’s not always their fault for either of those things.

Josh and Conor brought up Scott Dunbier’s name, which is an excellent name for this exercise, though he also gets the award for being the Most Expensive Books Editor, by far. He’s responsible for the two greatest comic formats in the last 30 years — Absolute Editions and Artist’s Editions.

Now we’re all looking forward to his Act IV line, especially with a tease for a collected edition of Darwyn Cooke’s “The Spirit” run. Those were 12 great issues of comics (plus the Batman crossover!) Glad they’re coming back!