Olyoptics Timeline - 1982 Page 3

The Experimental Era

When I returned to California , the age of color experimentation was on. Small comic companies were popping up all over. Pacific Comics from San Diego, First Comics from Chicago, Eclipse comics out of Guerneville, California, Comico and Gladstone. There was a big surge of new markets.

  Every company was exploring color on their own. No one was really happy with the old 64 color hand separated look. A variety of styles were tried. Everyone liked full color, but the costs were too high. Flat color was still the approach as they searched for new technologies. Blueline systems were kind of mysterious, and the double print system at Marvel had been pretty well abandoned due to registration problems.

  Pacific comics launched two Bruce Jones anthology books in 1982. Twisted Tales and Alien Worlds were modeled after the EC horror stories. Short, with a trick ending. I colored the first issues of each with the understanding that they were going to be hand separated somewhere. The first issue of Twisted Tales gave me the opportunity to color a Richard Corben story, which was designed to be full color. The rest of the issue was hand-separated.

  Since I’ve never liked to ruin my color guides with coding, I used to write the codes in Sharpie on an acetate overlay. That way after the job was done I could throw the codes away and still have nice-looking color guides.

  The first issue of Alien Worlds was going to be all hand separated, but at the last minute, on one Al Williamson science fiction story they decided to try something different. Apparently they liked my color guide so much that they took off the acetate with the codes and shot my colors as full color. The results were great. So much so that Al sent me an original Rip Kirby daily strip to thank me for what he called: “One of the best color jobs he’d ever gotten”. It was right there that I realized how much it meant to an artist to have a colorist who enhanced his art rather than destroyed it. Too many times the color in comics has been truly wretched.

  There’s an old saying in comics that: “Bad color can ruin good art, but good color can’t save bad art.”

  As a result of Al’s story, both of Bruce’s books began using full color. For Pacific at that time, I was just doing full color on Photostats. They shot the color and the black from the same art. I worked the same size as the comic, and had to make sure that I used transparent colors so I didn’t mess up the line art. The separations were probably shot 4 pages at a time to save money. They were just developing the drum scanner technology at that time, so the pages needed to be flexible to wrap around the drum. Prior to then, I usually mounted my coloring onto illustration boards.

  Somewhere along the line, the Greyline process was figured out. I think it was Cat Yronwode at Eclipse who came up with the idea. On a Photostat a 10% grey version of the lineart was printed. On a transparent overlay, the black line art was printed. This was the same concept as the blueline, but they could easily scan them on the drum scanner. It gave a pretty satisfactory look most of the time.

  The first time I worked on greylines for Eclipse Comics was December of 1984 on a Don Macgregor /Gene Colan project called Ragamuffins. It was pencil art, so Cat was very concerned that the color not overpower the delicate detail, but delighted with the results, and it led to lots of other work for Eclipse.

  For the next few years I colored in any number of styles. It was during this time that the Olyoptics studio was founded. I’d been using the name for years, but I had primarily worked alone. During this time, Abel Mouton and Reuben Rude began working with me.

  I colored greylines for Eclipse (Airboy, Mr. Monster, Aztec Ace, Ragamuffins, etc), bluelines for First Comics (Shatter and Time2), and DC (Blackhawk, Cosmic Odyssey, Gilgamesh II, Twilight), and flat and full color for the Epic line. (Coyote, Starstruck, Timespirits, the Bozz Chronicles)

I also colored a strange overlay method for Gladstone on their Disney projects.

  Everyone was looking for the best coloring approach.

  I had an idea that computers might be the next big thing. No one paid much attention until 1987 when I got my chance.