I used to co-host a video show here at Multiversity called “4 Color News & Brews”, and on it, we’d break down our favorite issues at the end of every month. We always had a blast with that, but when you’re doing the same thing on a regular basis, you start to notice trends. One month, my co-host Brandon and I picked up on something for the first time: Jordie Bellaire was coloring damn near everything on both of our lists.
Since then, the value of a colorist has grown increasingly apparent to me. It’s not that I didn’t know that they were important before – I always appreciated their work even when I wasn’t actively thinking about it – but like in that show I hosted, trends started to stand out.
When I looked at my favorite books, there were several colorists who were more consistently featured than any writer or artist. Now from a sheer volume standpoint that makes sense (as they work on more books than most writers or artists), but I realized that for me if certain colorists – like the now Eisner winning Bellaire, Matt Wilson or Matt Hollingsworth, for example – worked on a book, I liked the book nearly 100% of the time. They were a gold star guarantee of quality, and if one of my favorite colorists was working on a book, I was buying it.
For many readers or even critics, though, the power of a comic colorist isn’t so apparent, even in today’s more progressive era of colorist recognition. For some, it’s just an element that they don’t think of, and for others colorists are just the people who ensure that they’re not reading a black-and-white comic.
But they are much more than that. Colorists are storytellers in their own right, and their work can make or break a scene, issue or an entire comic, even when you don’t realize it.
To help shine a little more light on that, I’m going to explore the craft of coloring comics with the help of colorists like Bellaire, Wilson and Rico Renzi, and hopefully give you a little perspective on the hard work and true artistry it takes to do what they do in the process.
Fill in the Blanks
The average comic fan knows the very basic idea of what a colorist does – they color comics, right? – but even someone like myself, an avid reader and someone who goes above and beyond in understanding what makes a comic tick, has only the slightest grasp as to what a colorist really does, and how their work impacts us as readers. To find out exactly what that is, I went to the source: the colorists themselves.
“Our work is basically divided in two: we separate and we set a mood,” Muntsa Vicente, colorist of “The Private Eye”, shared.
“To separate means that you have to give a specific color to each element of the page. You need one color for the hair, one color for the shoes, one color for the sky, one color for a table, etc. That’s the most tedious part of the job, because depending on the number of characters and elements of the page it can be a very long process. Some colorists even have a person that only does this part of the job,” she continued. “Once you have it all separated, you proceed to set the mood of the page: you choose a source of light that can be natural (a window) or artificial (lamps, torches, flashlights) and you start giving lights and shadows and then you keep going considering other concepts like tension, sadness, violence, etc.”
“Color is basically the tool that allows you to give the reader the perfect environment for the story,” Vicente said.
“I usually try to break it down to film analogs. The writer is the writer. The penciller (and inker) are the director/cinematographer. The colorist is the cinematographer/lighting director,” Dave McCaig, colorist of “American Vampire: Second Cycle,” shares.
Continued below“I mean, it’s a bigger deal than most people give it credit for. Color is an integral part of visual storytelling,” he added. “Color conveys mood, form and focus.”
“From an inarguable, objective point of view, it’s storytelling,” Matt Wilson, colorist of “The Wicked + The Divine” and “Wonder Woman,” shared. “Comics are a collaborative medium, and colors can really help sell the storytelling experience or really ruin the whole book for the reader.”
“If the mixing of words and pictures to tell stories is what excites you about the comic book medium, then colors are a vital part of that mix,” Wilson added.
Rico Renzi, the colorist of “FBP”, agrees.
“Great color will be an extension of what the person who wrote the story and the person who drew the story are trying to achieve. Great color work will have a hierarchy,” Renzi said. “If everything is fighting for the viewers’ attention, it falls apart.”
“Nothing is important if everything is.”
In a very simple sense, what Renzi said right there is the crux of what makes a colorist’s job so important in comics. Color can be used in a way that does anything from pushing a reader’s eye to where it should go, to making individual elements in a dense page stand out, to subtly changing the atmosphere of a scene in a way that alters how it is read. It changes everything in the visual storytelling of a comic, even when a reader doesn’t know it.
Years ago, I interviewed Steven Finch (the letterer/designer that goes by Fonografiks and works on “Saga” and “Nowhere Men”), and he said that it’s generally a letterer’s aim to go unnoticed. While that’s not exactly true for a colorist, a lot of what a colorist does isn’t flashy, instead being more subliminal in the way they impact a story.
Every colorist is different in how they do that, though, and Vicente shared some of the greatest differentiators between colorists in her mind.
“One is our color palette. The colors that you choose from all the range of hues will make your personal color palette, that means that you have your favorite colors that will give your personality to the page,” she said. “Also, there’s the color treatment, meaning that we all have our particular way of working on the shades or in the construction of the objects and characters: some use dry brushes, others use gradients or flat shades, others airbrush, etc., and that (creates) the final color image.”
“But beyond these differences I understand that, above everything else, all colorists have the same goal, which is to serve the story to the best of our abilities,” Vicente added.
Like with any art form, greatness in comic coloring is subjective, but the colorists I spoke to shared their perspective on what they think makes color art stand out for them.
“Clearly defining different scenes or locations, conveying emotion with color, and separating planes (foreground, middleground, background) so the art is easily readable are all things I appreciate,” Wilson answered. For him, though, the more subjective side is where things get really interesting.
“I personally prefer a less rendered, less realistic look to comics, so I’m more drawn to colors that are flatter and rely more on color choice rather than rendering techniques,” he said. “It’s a preference I’ve always had, even in art school. I really enjoyed studying Baroque paintings and marveled at the artist’s skill at painting every detail. But the paintings that really spoke to me came from the Impressionists. The way they suggested detail without giving it and let the viewer’s brain fill in the gaps.”
“Something about that technique fascinates me,” he added.
Vicente goes in a similar direction as Wilson with what she looks for in color art.
“To me, coloring is basically about creating a world. I have no interest in being realistic or photographic, I love to use color at its full in an expressionist way, in the sense that has more to do with the emotions of the story rather than representing reality as it is,” she said, before adding that it’s key to help the artist tell a story, but very carefully.
Continued below“You have to do that always in an almost invisible way: express your personality without ever getting in the way.”
The Tie That Binds
You could argue that colorists are more important than ever, as double-shipping and rotating artists ensure that many prominent titles struggle with being visually consistent. Sometimes, a great colorist on a title can help bridge the visuals from artist to artist, acting as the tie that binds between them.
“When you have a system like you do on modern superhero books with rotating artists, colorists are keeping the look of monthly comics somewhat consistent when the trades come out,” Renzi said on the subject.
In fact, some of my favorite books of the past few years are titles that had many pencillers, but were colored by a single person throughout. Dean White on “Uncanny X-Force” (the Remender edition), Bellaire on “Zero” and Dave Stewart’s work in the Mignolaverse helped provide visual consistency to those books, ensuring that even when you had jumps from artists like Esad Ribic to Billy Tan, the visuals were unified in at least one way.
More than ever, colorists are perceived as key parts of the team and not just as a cog of the comic book assembly line, and it’s from that idea that runs like White, Bellaire and Stewart’s were born. As part of that, colorists keep in contact with their collaborators to help achieve that unified vision in a book.
“I tend to reach out to an artist and sometimes maybe even too much,” Bellaire said. Her goal isn’t to bug the artists and writers she’s working with, of course. She’s instead trying to help get her work to a point where everyone is happy and proud of the work when they’re all said and done.
“I try to be very open and I am into advance notes, direction, thoughts and reference from just about everyone on the team – including the editor – but at the end of the day, since I was trained as an illustrator, my heart is usually with the artist,” she added.
Everyone I spoke to for the piece maintains some level of contact with their collaborators on projects (some more than others, as Vicente lives with boyfriend/“The Private Eye” collaborator Marcos Martin), which has been made easier with the omnipresence of smart phones, tablets and other forms of technology.
Typically, all colorists discuss a project with at least the artist they’re working with, but Wilson is finding that it’s expanding beyond that more and more.
“These days, with the projects I’m on, the whole creative team communicates a lot,” Wilson said. “I’m sent the script, and often some notes or general thoughts about the colors before I start. Then I’ll get feedback once I turn in the pages.”
While not everyone works with legendary BFF’s Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, this more well rounded type of collaborative work is increasingly commonplace for colorists. Why that is, I’m unsure, but one has to imagine the ease of communication in 2014 and the advent of creator-owned are important factors in that change.
The intent and tenor of these interactions differ from artist to artist, as some tend to focus more on specific details while others look at color in a more atmospheric sense.
“In Javier’s (Pulido, artist on “She-Hulk”) case, he sends me color notes, page by page. The notes can be very specific, like ‘this character has to wear a blue shirt’ or more generic like ‘make sure that the central element of the action on that panel really pops out,’” Vicente shared. Martin tends to focus in the other direction, she added. “He gives me very few notes and (they) are always about the feeling of the page.”
That communication is very important in helping elevate the cohesiveness of the look and feel of a comic, but ultimately, it’s on the colorist to make their side of story work, and if it doesn’t, the whole house of cards could crumble. Their choices can and do change everything for a comic, and without great color work, you’ll rarely find a great comic.
Continued belowThe Realities of Coloring Comics
Of the five colorists I spoke to, only Renzi and Vicente don’t color full time. For the both of them it’s by choice, as they have other jobs they prefer to keep as well. For those that do choose to color comics for a living, though, it isn’t always a ritzy lifestyle.
“I think if you can budget yourself and have little to no debt, you can make a living off comics as long as you’re not expecting lots of luxuries,” Bellaire said about coloring as a full-time job, adding that she can do it partially because she colors a lot of books.
Colorists – like other comic creators – work on a page rate, unless they’re working in creator-owned. In that case, colorists can earn money in any number of ways, from page rates to payback off sales made, or some mix of both.
Page rates fluctuate in ways you’d typically imagine, as the bigger publishers like Marvel and DC tend to pay more, while other smaller publishers range on the lower end. But that has changed, Wilson noted.
“I’ve seen some smaller publishers raise their rates as their business has grown, and I’ve also seen rates come down at other, more established publishers in the last few years,” he said.
Wilson mentioned that rates were typically higher before he came into the business, and it seems that if rates aren’t being cut – Renzi shared that he knows other colorists who were asked to take pay cuts – then they certainly aren’t going up.
“I started working with Marvel four years ago. I sent a few sample pages and they established a basic page rate,” Vicente said. “I still have that same page rate.”
Whatever the rates are, it seems as if across the board the colorists I spoke to feel there is enough money there to make a living in that craft, but a lot of that is dependent on how many projects a colorist is willing to take on. Because of the relative low pay per page on a project for a colorist, most are working on several books at one time.
Bellaire is the most notable example of that, as at her peak she was coloring 17 books in one month, all of which were 20 or more pages. That’s a staggering amount of work in one month for a colorist.
It was far too much even for the prodigiously quick Bellaire, but she said that her true sweet spot for maintaining a high quality of work, a good living and, most importantly, not getting bored, she’d still be coloring 8 to 11 books a month.
“I get bored easy and I also love comics for art and story,” she said. “I think if I did any less than eight I’d be extremely bored and unhappy.”
Generally speaking, the full-time colorists I spoke to colored between four and eleven projects a month, which is a large range, but with coloring being as time consuming as it is and uniquely so by individual, it makes sense.
Of the colorists I spoke to, a single page tends to take on average one to three hours, although Renzi did note that he’s spent as little as five minutes on a page and as long as a week on one in the past. For an entire issue, the low end of the spectrum was Wilson wrapping one in two to four days, while Vicente’s record is two weeks and Renzi said some have taken him months to complete.
The huge range of time it takes for an average project makes many colorists reliant on two things. One is maintaining a solid schedule, with time budgeted to certain elements per project to help stay on top of everything. Sometimes surprising things can happen, and that schedule can help them maintain a little sanity in the process.
The other thing many colorists colorists rely on to help make their lives easier and work faster is working with flatters. These artists do much of the prep work necessary for colorists to do their job, preparing penciled or inked pages in the colorist’s preferred software with solid colors (those are called flats, which is where the title comes from) to help separate elements on the page. It’s the type of work that adds a lot of time to a project, which makes it advantageous for most colorists to hire a flatter.
Continued below“I have a flatter and I almost never flat anything myself anymore,” Wilson said. “There’s a point, when you have enough work being offered, that it doesn’t make sense for you to flat your own work. You could spend two weeks flatting and coloring one book. Or get two books flatted and color both of them over that same two week period.”
“Sure, you have to pay a bit out to a flatter, but you’re making more in the end.”
Colorists very commonly use them these days, but McCaig for one has moved away from the practice.
“I used to use flatters extensively, but I find that with the sorts of projects I pick these days, they usually can’t pick out the visual planes the way I would, so I usually do it myself,” he said.
Because coloring a book can be such a time consuming process, the colorists I spoke to tend to be as picky as they can be about what projects they take on, although being able to do that is something some have to train themselves on.
“I used to never be picky and that resulted in working on a lot of books I didn’t like,” Bellaire said. “Matt Hollingsworth told me I needed to be less spineless and start saying ‘No.’ Lots of people told me to start saying ‘No.’ And as of last year I did.”
“Now about 90% of the books I’m working on I’m super committed to and really in love with. It took some time to get here but I feel very, very lucky to have the projects and creative teams I care about.”
McCaig and Wilson both had to train themselves on the same thing, but at this point everyone I spoke to almost exclusively works on projects that they’re either personally interested in, story wise, or written and draw by people they enjoy collaborating with.
Wilson shared that typically the projects he takes on have “more to do with the other creators involved. Either I already know them and like them and like working with them, or they’re someone I admire and I want the chance to work with them.”
Their ability to be selective helps ensure that their colors are represented in the best overall package they can be, and that readers are going to see their work represented in the best possible light.
A Changing Landscape
In the past several years, there has been hugely increased levels of recognition of the contribution colorists bring to comics. There are a number of reasons why, including Bellaire’s write-up on her rather negative treatment by an unnamed comic convention leading to Colorist Appreciation Day taking over Twitter and Tumblr one day a year (January 24th, mark your calendar!), but regardless of the origin, that improved awareness of their work has both been recognized and appreciated by colorists.
“It’s probably hard to find an interview or article just about coloring even five years ago,” Wilson said. “Now I’m asked to do interviews fairly regularly, and I see a lot of my colleagues being interviewed as well. I also see more interest on social media and at conventions. I actually had a line multiple times at HeroesCon this past month.”
“A lot more people are noticing and taking interest in what coloring brings to comics.”
Renzi appreciates the positive sentiment that has come colorists ways in recent years, but he did note how Internet centric that adoration has been.
“On the Internet…there has been an effort made to recognize color work and we appreciate it,” Renzi said, but he did mention some concerns about how widespread that audience really is.
“Believe it or not though, the internet isn’t the real world and it’s a very small segment of the population that reads even the HUGEST comic news,” he shared. “The average person still doesn’t know they still make comics, they just like the movies.”
While it’s true that much of the publicity for colorists has come from the Internet, it’s hard to argue that great pieces like Oliver Sava’s AV Club article on colorists and Steve Morris’ bevy of colorist interviews are anything but helpful in improving recognition in the craft of a colorist. Social media like Twitter and Tumblr has helped bolster it as well, and Tumblr in particular has helped push colorist recognition greatly due to its highly visual nature.
Continued below
Wherever that boom in awareness comes from, it’s clear that there has been a shifting of the landscape for colorists, culminating in DC Comics’ recent move to give colorists both cover credit and royalties for their work on their books, a move that did not go unnoticed by colorists.
“Cover credit for colorists is an interesting topic to me, and when asked if it makes a difference to me personally, it’s hard to answer because it does and it doesn’t,” Wilson said. “I’ve done plenty of books without my name on the cover, and it didn’t diminish my experience or my contribution. I still got paid, I was still happy with my work, and I still made lasting professional connections and personal friendships. So, the business side of my brain doesn’t really care.”
“But do I wish those books had credited me on the cover all along? Yes, I do. I wish I was credited on the cover of the 30-something issue of ‘Wonder Woman’ run that I’ve colored over the past 3 years. DC had a very outdated way of viewing colorists until these recent changes. These steps said to colorists that DC recognized the flaw in their approach to coloring and that they’ve made the proper corrections,” he added.
McCaig said that change made a huge difference for him personally, and that it’s the type of thing that just made sense to him.
“How much does promotion cost DC? Not a dime. How much can involving me make them? More than zero. It’s a no brainer,” he said, before adding, “Including me in the incentives program makes me work all that much harder too.”
McCaig said it wasn’t all benevolence by DC in his mind, as “pumping colorists is a good move for DC. They know it. They see how it’s making stars of Marvel colorists. Stars sell comics, like they sell any entertainment product.”
Star colorists.
That’s a concept that even just a few years ago might have seemed absurd to many, but with the rise of colorists like Bellaire, Wilson, Vicente, McCaig and Renzi, it has become a reality. As I said at the beginning, I’m now buying books not just because of who writes or draws a book, but because of who colors it, and I’d wager I’m not the only one who thinks that way. It’s a paradigm shift for the comic industry, and one that may be causing a change in the mentality of the publishers, writers, artists and readers within it.
But that’s not what colorists necessarily want, really. It’s not a colorist’s end game to be perceived as a comic superstar. It’s more about respect, and recognizing that everyone – not just the writer and artist – on the creative team deserves it.
“I don’t think we’re necessarily as important as the writer or artist,” Bellaire said. “I know what they do is different in many ways and brings the book together in a big way, but there is an element of artistry in what we do.”
“I think it’s important that colorists be taken seriously in this business.”
Thanks to Dave McCaig, Jordie Bellaire, Matt Wilson, Muntsa Vicente and Rico Renzi for contributions on this piece. It goes without saying that this piece wouldn’t have come together without their help. For more on how colorists do what they do, read our process piece with colorist Marissa Louise here.
