September 28, 2010
A page from Batman: Black And White #3 (August, 1996) by Matt Wagner. In ye olden dayes, four-color separation for comics was done manually by cutting shapes from Zip-a-Tone film, an adhesive film pre-printed with halftone screen dots. Four different plates were produced by hand, one for each color of ink – cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The entire (fairly narrow) range of colors was produced by combining and layering ink colors in different screen densities. For example, a nice Hulky olive green consists of 50% cyan over 100% yellow, with maybe 10% black to tone it down. You were limited to the available densities of Zip-a-Tone film, which tended to go in 10% increments. If you wanted to brighten up that Hulky green just a hair by cutting the cyan to 48.5%, you were out of luck. The films were also flat expanses of a single density, with no tonal gradation (though there were some gradient films available, but tricky to use, and it was still nigh impossible to produce a real continuous-tone effect). For this reason, the old-school coloring process was known as “flat color,” as opposed to the “full color” wherein the separations are created by photographing painted pages through a variety of filters to produce the four ink plates. Full color was much more expensive than flat color, so it was reserved for special projects like covers and some graphic novels; regular floppy comics were almost always done in flat color. It defined the look of comics for generations. That changed in the early 1990s with the advent of desktop publishing and Photoshop. Instead of cutting dotted film with an X-acto knife, comics could be colored digitally and the separated plates rendered electronically through an image processor, and all relatively fast and cheap compared to photographing analog paintings. The old Zip-a-Tone film died out and flat color quickly gave way to digital color. This black and white Batman story, “Heist”, was published at the height of the digital color revolution and is a beautiful homage to the extinct Zip-a-Tone film. What you’re looking at is technically a collage made from artfully trimmed sheets of adhesive dots to form solid shapes of tonality. The sharp edges and chunky dots give it a great noir feel and make it something very distinctly comic-booky. You could do this today with Photoshop and pattern fills, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

A page from Batman: Black And White #3 (August, 1996) by Matt Wagner.

In ye olden dayes, four-color separation for comics was done manually by cutting shapes from Zip-a-Tone film, an adhesive film pre-printed with halftone screen dots. Four different plates were produced by hand, one for each color of ink – cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

The entire (fairly narrow) range of colors was produced by combining and layering ink colors in different screen densities. For example, a nice Hulky olive green consists of 50% cyan over 100% yellow, with maybe 10% black to tone it down. You were limited to the available densities of Zip-a-Tone film, which tended to go in 10% increments. If you wanted to brighten up that Hulky green just a hair by cutting the cyan to 48.5%, you were out of luck.

The films were also flat expanses of a single density, with no tonal gradation (though there were some gradient films available, but tricky to use, and it was still nigh impossible to produce a real continuous-tone effect). For this reason, the old-school coloring process was known as “flat color,” as opposed to the “full color” wherein the separations are created by photographing painted pages through a variety of filters to produce the four ink plates. Full color was much more expensive than flat color, so it was reserved for special projects like covers and some graphic novels; regular floppy comics were almost always done in flat color. It defined the look of comics for generations.

That changed in the early 1990s with the advent of desktop publishing and Photoshop. Instead of cutting dotted film with an X-acto knife, comics could be colored digitally and the separated plates rendered electronically through an image processor, and all relatively fast and cheap compared to photographing analog paintings. The old Zip-a-Tone film died out and flat color quickly gave way to digital color.

This black and white Batman story, “Heist”, was published at the height of the digital color revolution and is a beautiful homage to the extinct Zip-a-Tone film. What you’re looking at is technically a collage made from artfully trimmed sheets of adhesive dots to form solid shapes of tonality. The sharp edges and chunky dots give it a great noir feel and make it something very distinctly comic-booky. You could do this today with Photoshop and pattern fills, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

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  1. focalcurve posted this