If I told you to think of a Silver
Some artists pushed
Age comic book, what im-
age does your mind conjure?
Chances are, you’re picturing
a comic with bold lines and
bright, vibrant colors. Maybe
there’s an Ape on the cover. The
image in your head is nostalgic,
evocative, and inspiring to many
artists who try to recreate the
look and feel of the comics they
read growing up. The look of
these books however, wasn’t as
intentional as you may think.
The style of Silver Age comic
books, especially in regards to
color, was dictated largely by
the limitations of what could be
achieved under the administra-
tions that published them, and
how much said administrations
were willing to pay for print-
ing costs.
against these limitations, and
others were simply happy to
live within them. This article
is dedicated to the work of the
under-credited color artists and
separators who helped define
the look of the comic book
medium.
Comic books were, and still are,
printed as cheaply as possible to
maximize profits. Comic books
printed today benefit from ad-
vancements in printing tech-
nology that were unimaginable
half a century ago, with better
paper, machinery, and most of
all, computers. For a large part
of their history, comic books
were printed on newsprint
with Web Press Printers, the
same as Newspapers. Because
of this, and the color separa-
tion methods used, there was a
fairly limited color palette that
colorists could work with that
would reproduce accurately on
the medium it was printed on.
Through trial and error, the best
colorists found ways to use this
to their advantage.
How were pre-digital
comic books produced?
Throughout their long histo-
ry, comic books were mostly
produced using an assembly
line-esque process. In most
cases, a writer would turn in a
script, which was adapted by a
penciller into pictures (some-
times this was the same person).
The penciled pages would be
handed off to a letterer, who
would render the writer’s words
into a clean, readable, hand
drawn font. The pages would
then be handed off to an inker,
who would adapt the pencill-
er’s pencils into stark black and
white linework which could be
photographed for reproduc-
tion. The stark black and white
(Left) Illustration of the Marvel Comics
Bullpen by Marie Severin for the cover of
Foom #16. From December, 1976.
linework with lettering would
be duplicated, and handed to a
colorist who would create a col-
or guide. The original art, along
with the color guide, was sent
to a color separator who would
use the color guide to create the
color separations, which would
then be photographed sepa-
rately along with the original
art. The photographic negatives
would then be sent to an en-
graver to create printing plates,
which would be forwarded to a
printer, and voila!
You have a comic book.
At Marvel Comics, the meth-
ods used were similar to those
outlined above, but with some
very important and distinct
variations. They worked on what
was referred to as “The Marvel
Method”, wherein the writer
would provide a plot or outline
to a penciller (sometimes writ-
ten down, most times verbally)
and the penciller would then
create the entire comic based on
the outline. The penciled pages
would then be handed back to
the writer, who would add the
dialog before passing it down
the line to be lettered, inked and
colored. Sometimes the pen-
ciller would produce the entire
story in pictures without being
provided a plot by the writer. In
some cases, the penciled pages
would be complete with dialog
penciled in the margins, which
the “writer” would ignore,
adding their own preferred
dialog overtop erased notes. In
this case the “writer” would still
get a full writing credit, and the
penciller would only receive a
penciller credit, despite the fact
the penciller did the bulk of the
writing. Sometimes the pencill-
er would receive “Co-Plotter”
credit, but this was inconsistent-
ly doled out, with most con-
versations of credit happening
behind closed doors. This credit
discrepancy is something that
continues to come to light with
time, with fans hotly debating
proper credit to this day.
Sometimes multiple, if not all,
jobs in the comic making pro-
cess (penciling, inking, lettering,
coloring, and color separation)
would be performed by the same
person, usually referred to as a
Cartoonist. These individuals are
relatively rare in comic history,
but do exist. Cartoonists become
increasingly common the longer
comic books continue to exist,
with a much larger number of
Cartoonists operating today than
in pre-computer times.
 Vintage Color
Printing Theory
When comic books started to
catch on in the mid 1930s, most
publishers opted for the four
color printing method. The
four colors used and blended to
create the entire range of colors
used in vintage comics. Cyan
(blue), Magenta (red), Yellow,
and Black. CMYK (with the K
standing for the K at the end
of Black, or “Key”, as in the key
plate the other plates were regis-
tered to. Every piece of printed
material was made up of dots of
those four colors. These color
dots, when combined with the
remaining white of the paper,
tricks your brain into filling in
the gaps, resulting in merged
colors. The denser the dots, the
darker or more saturated the
color. This method is called four
color printing.
For roughly 30 years the Ameri-
can comic book industry largely
used the methods I’m about to
outline. Sometimes the meth-
ods varied, but this was a fairly
standardized process for color-
ing comics across the industry,
and aside from changes to print
production methods, most col-
orists still operated using these
techniques.
Coloring
The colorist would use a single
black and white copy of the
inked art, usually a photostat or
xerox, and, with vibrant colored
dyes, the colorist would design
the color guide for the page. As
the page was being colored, the
artist would write codes from a
color chart on the guide, which
the color separators would
follow to create the proper color
separations.
Mixing the color dyes was a very
inexact science, and the shades
and proportions of color on the
color guides would vary from
artist to artist. Each colorist
would have a collection of small
glass jars to keep dye mixtures
in, labeled with their color val-
ues, along with two larger glass
bottles for refilling and mix-
ing dyes at home. DC comics
bought watercolor dyes made
by Dr. Martin’s in bulk from the
manufacturer’s regular stock, as
well as a few special colors made
up exclusively for them by Dr.
Martin’s. Each colorist would
draw from the large bottles in
the office when they needed to
restock, filling their large glass
bottles, then mixing into the
small bottles for coloring.
 Jars of Dr. Martin Dye with a hand made color code reference sheet.
Images courtasy of Todd Klein. (Note: Not all color mixes are represented on the
reference sheet, as Todd didn’t find he used some of the colors very often. This was
common among colorists, who fell into their own unique color palettes.)

Crisis On Infinite Earths #11 page 7. (Left) Penciled by George Pérez, inked by Jerry
Ordway. (Right) Color Guide by Carl Gafford. Images courtesy of Heritage Auctions
 A page from World’s Finest #163 from December, 1966 with color code examples.
The colorist’s work is supposed
to look roughly the way the
printed page is supposed to
look. The most commonly used
dyes were water based Dr. Mar-
tin Dyes which were primarily
used by DC Comics, however
Marvel used powder based An-
iline Dyes for a time. The exact
method the colorist would use
didn’t matter, as long as what
they used was coded properly
for the separators to follow.
Some colorists used markers.
To create the grey in Batman’s
costume for example, a code
of R2B2 was used. This meant
that 25% of Red (R2) and 25%
of Cyan (B2) would be mixed
to achieve a pale purple, which
when mixed with the slight yel-
low of newsprint, achieved the
grey. The red of Superman’s cape
however, was YR (100% Yellow
and 100% Red), and used the
dye Ruby Special, pre-mixed ex-
clusively for DC by Dr. Martin.
The combinations of these tints
gave colorists a palette of 64 pos-
sible colors to work with, though
most colorists usually made use
of less than half of them.
In fact, DC Comics did not use
25% Yellow (Y2) or 50% Yel-
low (Y3) until 1969, when Neal
Adams made them incorporate
the tints into their coloring
process, meaning DC Comics
only used a possible range of
32 colors in most of their Silver
Age work. On the other end of
the Silver Age spectrum you
have EC Comics, which, (under
the brilliant eye of superstar
colorist and Jack of All Trades,
Marie Severin) strived to use the
full range of 64 colors across all
of their books.
Now after all this effort to mix
and lay down colors, none of the
actual mixed colors saw print.
Even if you mixed your colors
well, the dye mixes were only
guides for the color separators,
who followed the guides as
closely as possible given the vol-
ume of work they were expected
to do.
Limiting the palette to 64 colors
wasn’t entirely a cost cutting
measure, although that was part
of it. A palette of 64 colors was
about the plateau of what would
be discernible on newsprint,
anything else would be almost
indistinguishable shades of
muddy brown. The wider range
of colors were more likely to be
used on Covers, where Air-
brushing and other special ef-
fects could be used as they were
printed on heavier coated paper
stocks which could reproduce
such effects more effectively.
Color Separation
Most color separations were
done by a single factory found-
ed in Bridgeport, Connecticut
in 1954 called Chemical Color
Plate Corp. Color separation
was a job anyone could do, with
little to no experience required.
In Bridgeport, the job of color
separator has been described
as being in the same class as
grocery store bagger. There has
been a long standing urban
legend that the staff of Chemi-
cal Color Plate Corp was made
up of “little old ladies”, but this
was not the case. The staff of
Chemical Color Plate was made
up of anyone who needed a
job, regardless of age or gender.
In fact, sometimes when the
workload was especially heavy,
they would literally pull people
in from the street and give them
a job.
(Right) Marvel Comics 64-Color Chart
from Marvel Age 13. Published April, 1984,
Notice how muddy the colors become
the darker they get.
To translate the color guides
into color separations, nine
sheets of blank acetate would
be used for each page — one
for each of the three percent-
ages of the three CMY colors
(A 25% dot, a 50% dot, and a
100% (or solid) color.) The black
and white artwork — originally
drawn at twice (and later, one
and a half times) the printed
size, was photographed using
a Kodalith camera designed to
take ultra high contrast black
and white photos, reduced
and printed on a sheet of clear
acetate roughly the size of the
printed page. This sheet would
be used as the key sheet the oth-
er sheets were registered to.
The color separators were paid
per sheet, and would often try
to do as many sheets in a day
as possible to make the most of
their paycheck. As a standard
page would use nine sheets of
acetate (or seven at DC pre-
1969), if you did color separa-
tions for a single comic book
page, you would be paid for
nine (or seven) sheets worth of
work. Because of the pay incen-
tive, and varying degrees of skill
on the part of the separators, the
color separations were seldom
labored over, with the separators
 A photo of the interior of the Chemical Color Plate Corp in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Photo courtesy of Elliot R. Brown.
preferring speed over accuracy.
As you can imagine, this meant
that the quality of color separa-
tions varied wildly.
Holes were punched in the top
of each sheet and placed on a
flipboard, similar to old school
animation, to ensure everything
lined up (or registered) correct-
ly, with the color guide on the
bottom layer, and the linework
printed on acetate on the top
layer, with the rest of the sheets
sandwiched in between.
On each sheet of plastic, the
separator, using an opaque paint
similar to rubylith film, would
fill in the appropriate areas
on each of the acetates. When
dried, the opaquing medium
would look like a reddish brown
dried blood color. To create the
brown of someone’s hair for
example, they would paint the
same area on three different
acetates (the 100% yellow sheet,
the 50% red sheet, and the 25%
blue sheet).
Once the color guides were fully
“translated” and the acetates
were finished, each sheet of the
three values of each color — the
full or 100% value, plus the 50%
and 25% values were combined
and photographed with halftone
screen masks with a process
camera to turn them into one
 (Left) Color Guide by Carl Gafford. Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions. (Right) An
example of what the acetate for 100% Red (R) might have looked like.
piece of film which included the
percentage dots and the solid.
So we now have 9 separate piec-
es of painted plastic that have
been reduced to 3 film nega-
tives, and a negative that has the
black line art.
A similar process was used for
covers, except for effects like air-
brushing and gradients, the sep-
arators would paint a grey wash
for every color, and photograph
it with halfscreen tones, having
to imagine in their heads what
the grey values would translate
to in color.
The cover was considered one
of the most important parts of
the comic, because they were
used to sell the books. Covers
were usually reserved for more
senior separators. Covers, un-
like interiors, had proofs made
which could be reviewed and
adjusted. Once the acetates were
combined for each color, proofs
of the covers were printed on
transparencies and sent to the
Comic Publisher’s Editorial
office for final approval before
being sent to the engraver.
Interior proofs would have been
too costly to produce for every
page, so the color jobs were left
Examples of the color separation process for covers. Photos courtesy of Todd Klein.

Cover proofs for Avengers #201, November 1980.

Scans courtesy of Guy Lawley at Legion of Andy.
as simple as possible to avoid
complications and to save costs.
At some point in the 1970s,
DC started asking for proofs of
the first interior page only, for
enhanced quality control.
Once approved, the four film
negatives (Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow and Black Line Art) were
sent from the separator to the
engraver, where they would be
turned into large sheets of metal
printing plates. The engraver was
often housed at the same facil-
ity as the separators. The plates
were then sent to the printer, and
printed to completion.
Murphy Anderson
Murphy Anderson was an artist
with a long history at DC Com-
ics, beginning his career in the
1940s. He was one of the peo-
ple who could do everything,
and was mostly used as a fill in
whenever and wherever he was
needed, whether it was pencil-
ing, inking, coloring, touch ups
or more.
In 1973, he started Visual
Concepts with his son, and
started offering color separation
and lettering services. Visual
Concepts added a 75% tone to

Crisis On Infinite Earths #11 page 7. (Left) Color Guide by Carl Gafford courtesy of
Heritage Auctions. (Right) The final printed page. Notice how much more blue there is
in the color guide’s RB2 mixture compared to the final result.
the mix, thereby increasing the
palette from 64 to 128 colors.
The new 75% tones were coded
with a 4, so B4 was 75% blue
ink, Etc. Adding the extra tint
was as simple as creating three
more acetates for the separator
to paint and having the colorists
indicate those tones on their
color guides. In the beginning,
Murphy Anderson’s Visual
Concepts primarily did color
separations for DC and a few of
the smaller companies like First
and Eclipse.
At first, the expanded palette
was wasted in the standard
letter-press / newsprint comic
books. Too often, the 75% dot
printed heavily and looked like
a 100% solid, and often printed
muddy. It was seldom used…
For the time being.
Another Evolution
In the 1980s things began to
improve as DC moved into
the direct market. For a long
time, you could only buy comic
books through what was called
Newsstand distribution, which
included grocery stores, gas sta-
tions, convenience stores, bak-
eries, and… Newsstands! Comic
books were originally consid-
ered to be disposable. However
as the years went on, there was
an increased demand for what is
called back issues — older issues
of comics that weren’t currently
on the stands. This created a
business opportunity for some
store owners to start carrying
back issues. Initially, back issues
could be found in head shops
and some gas stations, but be-
fore long entrepreneurs began to

The range of colors offered by Murphy Anderson’s Visual Concepts. The left printed on
Newsprint and obviously pretty muddy, the right printed on whiter Baxter paper and
much more vibrant and distinct. Images courtesy of Todd Klein.
open stores dedicated to comic
book back issues. The growing
popularity of these stores caught
the attention of the publishers,
which started to provide comic
book stores with new stock di-
rectly. Eventually, the publishers
started producing comics that
were sold in comic books stores
exclusively. This was called the
Direct Market (IE, comic book
stores). Initially some of these
comics were produced on a
higher prestige level, as they
were targeted to more serious
comic book fans. They were
printed on new Baxter, Hudson,
or Mando paper stocks, often
perfect bound, and were sold at
a higher price tag.
When higher quality paper
was introduced, it was brighter,
sometimes glossy in the case of
Hudson, and had little to no ink
bleed. This meant that color pal-
ettes that had been refined for
newsprint over the years were
suddenly incredibly bright. Col-
orists had learned to take into
consideration the soft yellow
tone of newsprint when choos-
ing their color palettes, which
had the benefit of subtly unify-
ing and subduing the colors on
the page when their work saw
print. But because you couldn’t
see what the final colors would
look like until the comics were
printed, there was a difficult
transition period as colorists
had to relearn new color palettes
to fit the bright new paper that
their work was now being print-
ed on. One of the first major
examples of this transitional pe-
riod is Mike W Barr and Brian
Bolland’s Camelot 3000, which
was one of the first series print-
ed on Baxter paper, and features
an overly vibrant color palette
Tatjana Wood likely intended
for newsprint.
It was not until the industry be-
gan publishing comics in these
prestige formats on better paper
that the 75% tint became part of
the norm as colorists used less
and less 100% color saturations.
The advent of this resulted in
an industry wide move to larger
color palettes, and a need for
more subtle coloring work. By
adding the 75% tone, Murphy
Anderson’s Visual Concepts
raised the standard for colorists,
publishers, and their compe-
tition at Chemical Color Plate
Corp.
Now colorists were working
with better-quality printed
paper, much more vibrant than
(Left) Camelot 3000 #1 Page 19 Published in December 1982, with colors by Tatjana Wood
on Baxter Paper. (Right) The same page as it might have looked on traditional newsprint.

how it was printed before, and and by the highly influential and
allowing for greater use of experimental comics magazine
gradients and shading which Heavy Metal, which as far back
was previously only possible on as 1977 was able to take full ad-
covers. They still worked with vantage the higher production
a limited palette, but still a vast
values inherent in magazine
improvement compared to what production. Full Process Color
they’d worked with before. had been more commonly used
in illustration for magazines, but
The better paper stock also was seldom used in mainstream
opened doors industry wide for comics due to the cost, and
what is called Full Process Col- paper limitations. Full Process
or, in which the colorist paints Color didn’t hit the mainstream
the finished piece, which is then comic industry until Lynn Var-
photographically reproduced. ley used it to great effect with
There are examples of this meth- her coloring work in The Dark
od being used sparingly in com- Knight Returns, a prestige for-
ics since the 1940s in Europe, mat mini series where the inks
 The Outsiders Annual #1 page 4. Published in December, 1986. Penciled, inked and
colored by Kevin Nowlan. One of the first comics to fully take advantage of the newly
expanded color palette. Notice the multiple shades and hues of blue.
were printed in blueline, and
painted over with watercolor.
When the line art transparency
was added overtop of the pho-
tographed watercolor pages, the
effect was unlike anything the
Superhero Comic industry had
seen before.
In the late 80s, color started to
change again with the advent
of computer coloring. While
slow to catch on, as computers
became more affordable the in-
dustry began to adopt computer
coloring as the new standard.
Traditional color separation
couldn’t compete with computer
Pages from The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Millar with colors by Lynn Varley. Published
in June, 1986. Colored with watercolor over blueline then photographically reproduced.
coloring. Not only was the color
palette expanded infinitely, but
colorists could now rely on the
colors they were using to be
more or less exactly what would
print, or at the very least to a
much higher degree of accuracy
than what was possible before.
Demand for traditional color
separations dwindled, and ulti-
mately went away. After 33 years
in business, Chemical Color
Plate Corp folded in 1987.
Color separation is a largely
dead area of comic production,
but with a renewed interest in
the feel and look of older com-
 Three examples spanning 25 years attempting to recreate the vintage coloring of comics.
ics, artists are continually chas-
ing ways to replicate and revive
this look through digital means.
As outlined above, pre-digital
comic coloring was an alchemy
accomplished by many people
working in tandem. The hands
that touched the process var-
ied from seasoned vets with an
eye for detail, to pay by page
workers who just needed to get
through another day. To recreate
the conditions required to accu-
rately produce modern comics
in a pre-digital style seems nigh
impossible, but that doesn’t stop
artists from trying to achieve ve-
racity when creating work that
is reverent to the past.
Further Reading
If you found this zine interest-
ing, you owe it to yourself to
check out the following articles,
which were indispensable in my
research on this topic.
Massive thanks to Elliot R.
Brown, Todd Klein, and Guy
Lawley at Legion of Andy for
their informative and well
researched articles, to Heri-
tage Auctions for their archival
photos and scans, and an ex-
tra thanks to Todd Klein, Guy
Lawley, and Lia Taylor for their
feedback, correction and veri-
fication of certain production
elements.