José Villarrubia: From a Colorist's Perspective

I know I just wrote only a few days ago that the less time we spend on social media, the better. I still stand by it, but I must also admit when people are using them right.

José Villarubia is one of those people.

My first encounter with this gentleman's work was on the pages of the ABC comic book line, written by Alan Moore (who else?).

He is an exeptionally talented artist, photographer and colorist and particularly in this last capacity he has made an incredible contribution to the field with his facebook posts about colors in comics.

I hope he'll manage to organize these into a lecture or an extensive article someday. For the time being, you can enjoy his insights via his Facebook photo album

From a Colorist's Perspective

In many of these posts he also tackles the issue of recoloring older comic books, which is a fascinating subject to me but also criminally neglected.

Well, ok, it's not a crime to ignore the subject, but how come there is a seizable awareness about the importance of preservation and presentation of film and music (with discussions about formats, supports, mastering techniques, accuracy) but almost none about comics?

¡Que viva José! then, who delivered possibly the first serious contribution to the field of comic book coloring studies.

Make sure you read his notes and all the comments, where the discussion gets juicy.

I did not even know it was Ben Day (rather than Benday)...

This is a quickie to write, but if you love the subject, it will be a very long and interesting dive.

Here below are the links to the most exhaustive series of articles I have ever found on the old "Ben Day" coloring technique used in comic strips and comic books for nearly seven decades.

It concentrates mostly on the birth of the technique and old material, but it is well researched and documented.

I have a particular fondness for the old "dots".

Kudos to the blog, Legion of Andy and its author Guy Lawley

• Part 1 — Roy Lichtenstein — the man who didn’t paint Ben Day dots
• Part 2 — Halftone dots, Polke dots, more Roy
• Part 3 — CMYK / Four-colour comic book dots vs. RGB dots on screens
• Part 4 — Pre-history, origins — Ben Day in the 19th century
• Part 5 — Ben Day in lithography
• Part 5.5 — French comic strips of the 1880s. Coloured by relief aquatint.
• Part 5.75 — A lithographic protocomic (?) from 1885
• Part 6 — Ben Day meets the Sunday Comics in the 1890s
• Part 6.1 — Tarzan and the Ben Day Dots—secrets of 1930s comic strip colour
• Part 6.2 — Fun With (Mis-)Registration—when colour printing plates don’t line up
• Part 7 — The Birth of the Comic Book
• Part 8 — 1930s to 1950s - The golden age of comics