Do the people who colorize comics EVER read the damn things?

Cidu Bill on Aug 26th 2009

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Filed in Bill Bickel, Hi and Lois, comic strips, comics, humor | 26 responses so far

26 Responses to “Do the people who colorize comics EVER read the damn things?”

  1. Kate C Aug 26th 2009 at 09:50 am 1

    What I’ve heard, and I have no idea how true this is, is that coloring the strips is outsourced to non-English-speaking countries, so, no, they aren’t reading it. You’d think for strips like this one where the punchline depends on a color detail, the cartoonist/syndicate would do something to make it clear what needs to be what color.

  2. Pete Aug 26th 2009 at 09:54 am 2

    I’ll take a guess here. The colourist has a standard set of colours, and instructions to ensure consistency from one strip to the next. He colours the shirt white in this strip because he always colours the shirt white. If he puts a blue shirt today, it will contradict every other strip he has coloured.

  3. furrykef Aug 26th 2009 at 11:09 am 3

    Reminds me of Gasoline Alley a couple years ago. Our newspaper’s colorist always gave Slim a blue hat, even though on Sundays he always wore a yellow hat. (In Beetle Bailey, Sarge’s uniform was also green on weekdays and tan on Sundays. But that’s not relevant here.) So there was one strip where Slim remarked that both he and Dick Tracy wore yellow hats. And he pointed to his blue hat.

    Although this case here is even worse, since this is a nation-wide coloring job and not a local one. No doubt somebody at the syndicate is going to get really pissed off and try to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Here’s hoping they’ll be successful.

    - Kef

  4. Frosted Donut Aug 26th 2009 at 11:12 am 4

    Also, I’m guessing that the colorists are not rewarded for using an aesthetically pleasing range of colors that reflect the personalities of the characters in the comic strip. They probably are judged on how quickly they can crank through strips. Reading the strip would just slow you down.

    This also explains the strips where you get flesh-colored eyeballs (like “Apt 3-G”).

  5. paperboy Aug 26th 2009 at 11:19 am 5

    What about the papers that don’t print week-day comics in color? (oh.right; nobody reads newspapers)

  6. Cidu Bill Aug 26th 2009 at 11:20 am 6

    Here’s a thought: How about when a comic is drawn in black-and-white, the syndicate just leaves it the hell alone? Did we learn nothing from Ted Turner?

  7. Charlene Aug 26th 2009 at 11:34 am 7

    It’s very true that colouring is outsourced to countries where English is not commonly spoken, and in addition the colourists aren’t paid enough money to attract someone with English skills.

    So yeah, it’s like getting a guy from Kansas who’s never even seen the Japanese language to colour manga. And the syndicates are to blame, 100%.

  8. Marshal Aug 26th 2009 at 11:35 am 8

    As much as Newspapers are having to cut back to save money you would
    think that colorizing anything except the Sundays would be the first thing
    they did away with.

  9. Cidu Bill Aug 26th 2009 at 11:37 am 9

    Agreed, Marshal: it seems like such a waste of money.

    Color is part of what makes the Sunday comics special.

  10. furrykef Aug 26th 2009 at 12:08 pm 10

    Yeah, I’ve looked into printing presses and color is just insanely expensive compared to black and white. Not only are there three more colors (so it’s 4x the price right there), there’s also the effort of coloring and additional complications.

    I’ve already railed against coloring the weekly strips, partly ’cause it was often done badly and the line art was never edited to better match the coloring. Caulfield in Frazz was affected the worst, because he’d have lines all over his face and be colored brown, which is ugly and makes no sense. That particular problem doesn’t seem to be so bad now, though, probably because Jef saw the problem and used fewer lines to shade Caulfield to compensate.

    But anyway, I don’t really mind the idea of weekly comics being in color, but I have to say, if you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all.

    - Kef

  11. Kate C Aug 26th 2009 at 12:55 pm 11

    I seem to recall reading an interview with Darby Conley, the guy who does Get Fuzzy, who said that he purposely makes his dailies with a lot of shading, grayscale, etc to make it as clear as possible that it shouldn’t colored. But still gets colored sometimes, and ends up looking terrible.

    On a related note, I always hated how colorized daily FBORFW always featured the absolute ugliest color combinations for their clothings–orange pants with olive green sweaters, navy blue and fuschia, and always with the lavender, sometimes even a shirt and pants that were two slightly different shades of light purple.

  12. CIDU Bill Aug 26th 2009 at 01:02 pm 12

    Does Conley truly believe the shading and grayscale will get the message across so that a syndicate that wants to colorize its comics won’t colorize his? All he’d accomplish is making his colorized comics look that much worse.

    Some newspapers want their daily comics colorized, and apparently the balance of power is such that the syndicates have to accommodate them.

  13. Vroshnak Aug 26th 2009 at 01:14 pm 13

    It’s hard to believe that it costs so much to color a strip that we have to send the work overseas. I mean, you could probably find a college student with a pirated copy of Photoshop willing to do it for soda money. Bonus, he’d make the shirt blue.

  14. Rasheed Aug 26th 2009 at 04:11 pm 14

    Does anyone remember the fiasco in Curtis a couple years back? Curtis was in summer school with a blonde white girl and a blonde white teacher. Then the teacher became black, and finally the girl in her last appearance. I have absolutely no idea which one was “correct.”

  15. Dan Aug 26th 2009 at 05:32 pm 15

    I have to admit I’ve never seen a colorized daily comic in print. Or if I did, it was a long, long time ago. No paper I read now has color comics except for Sundays.

    The thing is, even though these are outsourced to non-English-speaking countries, there’s no reason why their supervisors (in the States or there overseas) can’t, you know, manage the process.

  16. Aaron Aug 26th 2009 at 07:24 pm 16

    In one of Scott Adam’s Dilbert collections, he points out a strip where the implied joke is that the night time security guard steals things. The coloring people made the security guard black and all of the other characters white. Of course Scott was the one who got hate-mail for it.

  17. Joshua Aug 26th 2009 at 07:54 pm 17

    In a flashback/re-run strip of For Better or For Worse about two years ago, Elly and her mother were having a pointless argument, in which Elly said, “Do you have to wear blue all the time, Mom?”

    Naturally, the colorist colored Elly’s sweater blue in that strip.

  18. chuckers Aug 27th 2009 at 05:38 am 18

    To be fair, a blue shirt would look pretty hideous with that black suit he has on.
    So much so, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell he had a shirt on.

  19. Powers Aug 27th 2009 at 06:40 am 19

    Oh yeah, this is becoming epidemic. In Rex Morgan a couple of months ago, the color of June’s swimsuit was completely different between dailies and Sundays. Of course, in cases like that, the colorist may have no idea how the artist colors the Sunday strip.

    But this isn’t a new problem. I have a Star Trek comic book from the seventies (packaged with a vinyl record that provides sound effects) in which Sulu is black (and wears a blue uniform) and Uhura is white with blonde hair.

  20. Lord-z Aug 27th 2009 at 07:07 am 20

    I always figured that the colour-monkeys got the cartoon without text, so that they were working blind when it came to colours.

    The worst example I have seen, was a Snuffy Smith, where he is annoyed that his wanted-poster is in black and white. The colour-monkeys painted the poster in full colour.

  21. Rasheed Aug 27th 2009 at 07:17 am 21

    Come to think of it, recently in The Phantom, they were on a ship with an Indian captain, so of course she was colored blonde Caucasian, with a YELLOW dot on her forehead for whatever reason!

    I’m trying to remember who or where I heard, but I thought dailies are supposed to be delivered with some sort of watercolor guide? I thought it was SUPPOSED to help whatever colorist at least get within the ballpark of the cartoonist’s intentions.

  22. tristara Aug 27th 2009 at 08:09 am 22

    http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=fd4c4b040bc2de1fd992eed7ee7d6d84

    while we are on the subject, KHAKI is a COLOR, not a STYLE!

  23. Elyrest Aug 27th 2009 at 12:06 pm 23

    tristara - khakis are pants as well as a color. Just as orange is a fruit as well as a color.

    chuckers - Hi would be wearing a light blue shirt not a dark blue one. I’ve always found it interesting that in early B&W TV men had to wear light blue shirts with their suits because the whites shirt sort of strobed out on the TV sets.

    This will conclude the color part of our commentary.

  24. That Idiot Ivan Aug 28th 2009 at 01:15 am 24

    Furrykef-
    Many papers are already running four-color, for the news photos, and because of the reader demand and … oh yeah … the ads, so its not a big deal.

  25. Lawrence Fechtenberger Sep 2nd 2009 at 10:45 am 25

    Powers–Those STAR TREK comics came out during a period when the original licensing contracts with the cast were expiring. At that point, George Takei and Nichelle Nichols had not signed new contracts, and so their images could not be used in the comics. Apparently, an order was given to make certain that Sulu and Uhura did not look like the actors, and someone decided the way to do this was to change their races.

  26. Lawrence Fechtenberger Sep 2nd 2009 at 10:49 am 26

    I should add: Paramount was especially sensitive about this, because it had then recently had to pay Leonard Nimoy a lot of money for letting his image as Spock be used in a beer ad without getting his permission first.

    Yes, I know: No one is more pathetic than someone who spouts STAR TREK trivia.

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