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Comic History

Wayback Whensday: Origins of the Color in Comics

Published: July 29, 2026 1 minute 4 comments
Left: Ben Day dots, Center: Craftint Multicolor, Right: the painted acetate method

True Grit Texture Supply provides us with Guy Lawley’s history of the development of color in the Sunday Color Supplement and the comic books of the 20th Century in The Origins of Vintage Comics.

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. 

The Yellow Kid (“Hogan’s Alley”) by George B. Luks, New York World 1897

The color presses used for the Sunday comics developed from the original ‘web rotary’ newspaper presses, first built by the Richard M. Hoe company in 1870, specifically to print black text on newsprint at phenomenal speed…

Printing illustrations on these super-fast industrial machines, designed for text, was highly challenging. In 1883 Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World overcame the difficulties and introduced regular cartoons and illustrations, limited to black-and-white line drawings.

In 1890, in Paris, France, a printing press manufacturer named Hippolyte Marinoni, who also owned a newspaper, built the first successful four-color rotary. Adding extra cylinder pairs to print red, blue and yellow was a major technical feat, especially getting four plates to print in reasonable alignment with each other — ‘in register’ — not an issue when printing only in black. Marinoni printed a weekly color supplement for his daily paper le Petit Journal (‘the little paper’) — 8 pages with color front and back covers — soon reported to be selling an unprecedented million copies a week.

Publishers abroad took notice…

excerpt: The Origin of the Impressionist School of Art by T.E. Powers, Chicago Inter Ocean, 1893

While waiting for Part Two check out the other sources Lawley recommends in his notes:

[7] I recommend coming back here for Part 2, which will be an informative summing up of a great deal of fascinating stuff… but if you can’t wait, these three sources have accurate material: my blog — a good jumping-on point is: BEN DAY DOTS Part 9a: 1950s and 60s — the ‘Silver Age’ of comics, Part 1 | LEGION of ANDY; plus: A Brief and Broad History of Post Golden Age-Pre-Digital Comic Book Coloring by Sarah on Medium; and Marvel Behind The Scenes – Beyond The Behind*! Chemical Color Plate | Eliot R. Brown.com.

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Comments 4

  1. Even stepping back from the technical issues about how the halftone dot patterns were engineered to produce various color combinations, the “simple” process of creating a labeled overlay to identify the colors in a Sunday newspaper comic was not entirely trivial. Bill Watterson touched upon a number of the issues in the “Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book“, mentioning that during the brief (ten-year) history of the strip, the system had been enhanced to allow a wider palette of colors in Sunday pages, even permitting “fade” effects from one color to another, such as in this example (28-Feb-1993). Comparing the colors in his later Sunday half-page panels to the flat colors in the earlier “standard template” strips reveals a significant difference in color quality.

    P.S. Two current strips with superior coloration are “Breaking Cat News” and “Wallace the Brave“.

  2. it in the 80s—little more than a decade into my career—I felt like once i walked out of the newsroom into the backshop i was going back in time a hundred years and unlike my writer and photog cohorts i, an artist, had to function in both centuries. Then things changed. at first i drew with pen on paper for black, topped by rubylith and zipatone overlays and hoping for the best. By the 90s it was all on screen, all WYSIWYG, and the backshop was shrinking. By the 00s it was gone. By the teens so was I. The newsroom had shrank into phone sized bits scattered about as had the media it worked in there was no room for artists there

  3. I give up.
    WHAT is wysiwyg ???
    for the life of me, I cannot fathom it.

    1. WYSIWYG means that newspapers had switched the entire graphic process from design experts to computer workstations. The idea was that What You See (on the graphic monitor) Is (or should be) What You Get (on the printed page), so that physical cutting and pasting were no longer needed. Unfortunately, neither were many of the artists.

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