The Origins of Vintage Comics Part 1

By Guy Lawley Just about every illustrator on the planet has a soft spot for the warm, nostalgic aesthetic of vintage comics. The visible dot patterns, uneven, mis-registered print and cheap newspaper stock offer a stark contrast to modern offset printed comics and graphic novels. For all the love the aesthetic gets, few of us know how vintage comics came to look this way, or what technologies were used to print them. Comics historian Guy Lawley has spent years tracing that history. In part one of this two-part series, he'll take you on a fascinating deep dive into the newspaper industry's color printing arms race, the surprising origins of the speech balloon and an introduction to the comic color systems used by craftspeople who never set foot near a computer. PART ONE: Four Colors on the Comic Book Page If you're an artist with an interest in the vintage comic book aesthetic, you probably already know how digital brush systems and effects kits like KrafTone and Debaser can recreate that same low-fi color and texture in your artwork. You might be less familiar with the vintage print technology which originally shaped this classic look on the pages of Golden and Silver Age comics. This is Part 1 of a two-part series which will attempt to answer the question: how and why did the highly characteristic appearance of these comics evolve? True Grit's KraftTone digital comic coloring system in action, replicating the retro color, dotted tints, and uneven blacks characteristic of vintage comics. A few years ago I set out to discover as much as I could about the printing and production of vintage comics color. Although in principle the process is very similar to the example above — colors were added to B&W artwork — the pre-digital technologies were far removed from today's onscreen methods. They can be quite astonishing to behold! The comics which share this aesthetic were published in the USA between the 1930s and the 1980s. They were mainstream comic books published by Marvel, DC, Archie, EC etc., and while their art styles and the contents of their stories varied from genre to genre, and changed through the years, the features we associate with their classic 'look' — dull-surfaced newsprint paper, black outlines, flat color and noticeable dot patterns — remained quite consistent. Between the 1930's and early 1980s, comics were dominated by one aesthetic, and it had nothing to do with art style, world-building or narrative. It's often said that the characteristic appearance of those old comics pages was related to the cheap printing of the times. In the 1980s and 90s everything changed, with the advent of brighter, whiter paper, and new methods of printing and coloring, but the story of how the low-fi print aesthetic of pre-digital comics came to be is about much more than cheap printing. Comics Then and Now Comics today can be written, drawn, colored, edited, published and distributed entirely digitally, and finally read onscreen. Of course, many comics are still printed as 'floppies' or in book form, but these too can be produced 100% digitally using CtP (computer-to-plate) technology which has been widely used since the mid 90s. This modern technology that takes a digital file and laser-etches it onto aluminum printing plates would have sounded like science fiction to Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, or any other comics creator in the Golden or Silver Age. By the same token, the techniques used from the 1930s to the 1980s are disappearing into a realm of myth and legend, shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. The old-school comics aesthetic is well-remembered, both within and outside the comics world, especially since it was famously appropriated by the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein in the early 1960s — albeit magnified and transformed. But the details of the long-gone printing methods themselves have never been widely known, and within fandom have been of almost no interest compared with, say, the minutiae of pencilling, inking, and who really created Wolverine. The contrasting appearance of comic books printed in 2026 and 1966 is perfectly illustrated below using details from DC's Wonder Woman; these squares were originally 2 x 2 cm. The 2026 page (left) is printed with a dot screen small enough to be imperceptible to the reader, whereas the 1966 Wonder Woman, as non-comics people often say, might have had measles. Detail comparisons of DC's Wonder Woman printed in 2026 (left) and 1966 (right), each square originally 2 x 2 cm. Modern printing shows no visible dot pattern; the 1966 printing reveals a pronounced mechanical dot structure. The 'Four-Color' Problem Among comics historians and collectors, 'four-color' is often used as shorthand for older, pre-digital comic books with the vintage aesthetic many of us have come to obsess over. In online forums and comics conventions alike, four-color has become synonymous with the aesthetic and has its roots in the Red, Blue, Yellow & Black printing process that created it. These colors became formalised in the well-known CMYK system, the initials of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK — or K for ‘key’. But four-color in this sense is hardly unique to comics. Today, you might well work with RGB images onscreen, and need to convert them to CMYK for print. The two systems are summed up in the Venn diagrams below. Venn diagrams comparing the RGB (additive, screen) and CMYK (subtractive, print) color systems. The phrase 'four-color' was used early in the US comic book business, when major publisher Dell famously named a series 'Four Color' from 1941 to 1946 (or so collectors say; it was in fact only a sub-title[1]). But four-color printing was not unique to comic books in the 1940s or at any other time; nearly all color printing in the US after the early 1900s was (and still is) CMYK — anything from pizza leaflets to glossy magazines to high-end art books and modern newspapers. This includes today's shiny new comic books with their bright white paper and sophisticated offset printing. In other words, when US comic books changed so radically in the 80s and 90s, they did not stop being 'four-color' — and they still haven't. Nonetheless, if you refer to a 'four-color pizza leaflet' today, it means something different to vintage comic book aficionados. A modern printed surface magnified approximately 200x, clearly revealing the individual CMYK halftone dots used in contemporary offset printing. In a literal sense, comics were no more and no less 'four-color' from the 1930s to the 1980s than they are today. 'Four-color' might be considered a 'useful' shorthand in that it's a well-known term, but it would be wrong to imply that four-color printing was what defined the aesthetic of classic comics. This is why I prefer terms like 'vintage' and 'classic', although my personal favourite term is 'old-school'. So what was specific about the four colors on the old-school comic book page, as opposed to other types of CMYK printing? Maybe it was the 'dull-surfaced newsprint paper' which I mentioned before? Newsprint was cheap, thin wood-pulp paper, originally developed, as its name suggests, for the newspaper industry — for a low-priced product mainly destined to be thrown out after reading. The pros and cons of comics color on newsprint vs brighter, whiter paper are discussed daily in social media, mostly favoring newsprint (in my feed anyway). I scanned a panel from Marvel's 1971 newsprint Conan the Barbarian no. 9 (left), seen here alongside an offset litho reprint from Conan Classic 9, 1995, scanned with the exact same settings. They appear markedly different, although technically the original coloring has been reproduced with almost complete accuracy in the reprint. If you can spot the minor error, please write in for one of Marvel's famous no-prizes[2]. Left: scan of a panel from Marvel's Conan the Barbarian no. 9 (1971), printed on newsprint. Right: the same panel reprinted in Conan Classic no. 9 (1995) via offset litho, scanned at identical settings. Rather than 'four-color', could the vintage American comic book era be more accurately termed the 'newsprint era'? Arguably, yes, but in fact the comics owe much more to the newspaper industry than just their paper. From the 1930s to the 1980s, mainstream US comic books were not only printed on newsprint but also on printing presses originally designed for newspapers. The first ever comic books in what became the standard US format, Funnies on Parade and Famous Funnies in 1933 and 1934, were published by a printer. The Eastern Color Printing company of Connecticut specialised in Sunday newspaper comic sections — home of the 'Sunday funnies'; color comic strips like Little Orphan Annie and Buck Rogers, read by millions across the USA. Eastern's new comic books were reprints of newspaper strips and were printed on the very same color newspaper presses as the Sunday sections, using the same newsprint paper. The earliest American comic books were reprints of newspaper strips. Left: an original Buck Rogers newspaper strip from 1936. Right: A Famous Funnies reprint of Buck Rogers from 1942 (not to scale). Other publishers soon tried their luck with reprint comics, and began publishing new material. The 'Golden Age' of US comics took off after Superman appeared in Action Comics no. 1 in 1938, and spawned countless super-heroic imitators. The World Color company of Illinois, another printer of color newspaper sections, also began to specialise in comic books — DC started printing there in 1955; Marvel didn't leave Eastern until 1968. While evolving through the decades in many ways, the comic book business continued to use the same type of printing until the 1980s, although like the comics, the machinery was modernised over time. In the comics business, the huge, industrial rotary presses came to be known as 'letterpress' machines — not to be confused with the artisanal letterpress printers of today, who often use small hand-powered presses.