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?

The Newsprint Origins of Vintage Comics.

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.

The Rotary Printing Press and a Publishing Arms Race.

The Sunday funnies had their own origins in New York newspapers of the 1890s and early 1900s — some of the earliest color printing in newspapers.

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. The 'web' was the gigantic roll of paper fed in at one end; 'rotary' referred to huge rotating cylinders — a B&W press had two pairs of these, one pair printing on each side of the paper, from curved printing plates. A 1930s model can be seen in action in the film below.

Fig. 6 — A 1930s web rotary letterpress in operation, illustrating the industrial scale of newspaper and comic book printing of the era.

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. A new London weekly, The Million, was printed with Marinoni color presses in 1892. Later that year, the daily Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper started a color supplement. In its three years of publication The Inter Ocean might have published as few as three wordless comic strips; probably the earliest to appear in rotary color. Here are two panels from T. E. Powers' rarely seen October 1893 strip, The Origin of the Impressionist School of Art.

Two panels from T. E. Powers' strip The Origin of the Impressionist School of Art, published in the Chicago Inter Ocean, October 1893. Among the earliest comic strips to appear in rotary color printing.

However, despite pervasive claims to the contrary, The Chicago Inter Ocean did not buy a Marinoni press. It commissioned a new type of rotary press from the New Jersey firm of Walter Scott, said to be bigger, better and faster. This was a major development. New York newspaper publishers were taking notice, and when they began shopping for their own color presses, an 'arms race' began between the Scott and Hoe companies.

But color rotaries, printing at speed on newsprint, still had limitations — including mis-registration, which was not fully solved. By contrast, in books and magazines an illustration revolution had been underway since the 1820s. They used slower flatbed presses, printed on better paper, generally with more than four colors, and used techniques that simply weren't available to newspaper printers.

In May of 1893, when Joseph Pulitzer's team tried to reproduce famous paintings in color in the Sunday New York World, it was an embarrassing failure. Meanwhile the humor weeklies Puck and Judge, also in New York, were publishing regular political cartoons and occasional comic strips, luxuriantly printed in five colors by lithography — i.e. from flat slabs of stone. In January 1894, The World launched a regular Sunday humor section, deliberately copying the Puck and Judge formula insofar as The World's rotary printing would allow — including cartoons, comic strips, and color. It was a lucrative, circulation-boosting hit. Pulitzer's costly color press had at last started to pay for itself, because The World had found the right subject matter for its limited capabilities — and for a receptive New York readership.

Meanwhile both The Million in London and The Chicago Inter Ocean were struggling, and would soon go under. But in San Francisco, newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst was taking notice.

THE NEW YORK WORLD WAS WHERE THE OLD-SCHOOL COMICS AESTHETIC, OR A CLOSE PRECURSOR, WAS BORN SOME 40 YEARS BEFORE THE FIRST COMIC BOOKS.

Shown below is the Yellow Kid, the first superstar of The World's funny pages, in close-up views of a single-panel cartoon from 1897. The aesthetic was a few steps away from its mature form. For example, the red ink was scarlet, not yet magenta; it would be many years before CMYK colors were anything like standardised, in comics or elsewhere. For another thing, this Yellow Kid feature was not actually a comic strip… but change was already underway in the color pages of another paper.

Close-up details of a Yellow Kid single-panel cartoon from 1897, by George Luks for the New York World^[3]. The early CMYK aesthetic is visible, though not yet fully standardised — note the scarlet rather than magenta red ink.

In 1895 William Randolph Hearst took over the failing New York Journal, and in 1896 added a shameless imitation of The World's funny section — with more color pages. Hearst also poached the Yellow Kid, and his cartoonist Richard F. Outcault, from The World. Pulitzer hired George Luks to continue The World's version of the Kid — the image above is by Luks, from 1897. The 'arms race' wasn't just between printing press manufacturers!

Speech Balloon Comics.

The Yellow Kid's cartoons in The World were always single panels, and the paper's comic strips at that time were either wordless or had captions under each panel, like the Puck and Judge strips which they imitated. Outcault's Kid appeared in a comic strip for the first time in The Journal in 1896 — with dialogue in speech balloons carrying the narrative, and no under-panel captions. Between 1896 and 1898 a few more Yellow Kid strips appeared in the Journal, some with speech balloons, many without. In 1899 somewhat more regular use of balloons began in Rudolph Dirks' Katzenjammer Kids, and in 1900 the new Happy Hooligan strip by Frederick Opper became the first to use them almost every week^[4]. Both were Journal strips.

By 1905, when Little Nemo in Slumberland appeared in the New York Herald — taking the Sunday strip to a new level of graphic excellence — the color funnies were proliferating rapidly across the USA, and most of them were using speech balloons. The 20th century's first new mass medium had arrived.

Panel from Little Nemo in Slumberland, scanned from a 1907 page. By this point the Sunday color strip had achieved a new level of graphic ambition, and speech balloons were fast becoming the medium's defining convention.

Although the roots of comics were undoubtedly in Europe, the sudden appearance of the narrative speech balloon definitively marked the new comic strip form as an American innovation^[5]. And it owed its existence to the color rotary printing press.

The Importance of Shoddy Printing

Everything in comics which stemmed from The World's 1894 Sunday humor section owes its existence to the limitations of color rotary printing: the NY Journal's comic strips; all the Sunday strips of future years — Flash Gordon, Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes and so much more; the comic books of DC, Archie, Marvel etc.; Mad and the undergrounds; RAW and Maus... and on and on… and that's just the USA.

"COMICS AS WE KNOW THEM WERE NOT BORN DESPITE SHODDY COLOR PRINTING; THEY WERE BORN BECAUSE OF IT."

When Dell sub-titled a comic book series 'Four-Color Comics' in 1941 this print history was presumably on their mind, but as I've noted there was plenty of four-color printing going on in other media too.

Apart from the four-color rotary press and its newsprint paper, one other major factor shaped the detailed features of the old-school comics aesthetic — something which has never had a comic book series named after it — color separation.

Not Just Four Colors — Four Separate Colors

When a comics page is printed, whether on a rotary press or by modern offset lithography, each color of ink needs a separate printing plate. All four plates need to lay down an image on the same area of paper, one after another, the combined colors adding up to the desired final result. Each of the four printing plates needs to carry a completely different image; an identical image printed in four different colors isn't going to get the job done.

'Color separation' is the process of creating the four images needed for the four printing plates. The term 'color separations', usually in the plural, is also applied to the four images themselves, generally only seen when printed one at a time for purposes of 'proofing' — checking by an editor, production person or printer.

Until recently, I thought that DC and Marvel only proofed separations for their covers, but recently I've learned that DC also checked interior pages at times. Here's something you won't see every day; proofs for a 1972 DC romance splash page, scanned from the four acetate sheets which were sent to DC for checking. Originally each one was the size of the published comic page. Color separations like this were generally thrown out after use, but some have survived due to the collectibility of comic art in all its forms.

Progressive proofs for a 1972 DC romance splash page, scanned from the original four transparent acetate separation sheets sent to DC for editorial checking. Yellow, magenta, cyan  and black are shown individually, then stacked in printing order to reveal the combined result.

Known as 'progressive proofs', these transparent acetates could be checked individually, and laid one on top of the other in printing order — yellow at the bottom, then magenta, cyan, and black on top — to see their combined effect. Shown here: a detail of the four stacked sheets, and the same area of the printed page.

Detail of the four progressive proof acetates stacked in printing order (yellow, magenta, cyan, black), alongside the corresponding area of the final printed page.

From Black and White Art to Color Comic

It's well known that the making of old-school comics art began with pages pencilled on a piece of white 'art board', followed by lettering directly on the board, then inking with black India ink using a brush and/or pen. Corrections where needed, and the 'pasting up' of any printed text, were also done directly on the board.

Black-and-white comics artwork was photographed and used directly to make the black printing plate, from the earliest days of the Sunday funnies in the 1890s to the 1980s, by the process of photoengraving. Despite the name, this kind of photoengraving used none of the halftone screening used to reproduce the grey tones of a B&W photograph. It was strictly a 'no grays' or 'line block' process, introduced in Paris in the 1870s by printing pioneer Charles Gillot. By the 1880s it was in routine use for B&W line drawings in wealthier big-city newspapers, following the lead of the New York World.

Here's the black-and-white art for a page of The Incredible Hulk no. 164 from 1973, originally one-and-a-half times larger than the comic — from the web site of Heritage Auctions — and a scan of the printed page.

Left: original black-and-white artwork for The Incredible Hulk no. 164 (1973), drawn at 1.5x published size (via Heritage Auctions ha.com). Right: scan of the corresponding printed page, showing how color and dot patterning transform the linework.

At some point between these two steps, color separations were created, and four printing plates manufactured. The next stage in the process is fairly well known, again thanks to the collectors' market, and decades of fan journalism. A colorist painted something called a 'color guide', like the one seen here, also from Heritage Auctions.

Color guide for The Incredible Hulk no. 164 (1973), painted on a B&W photocopy of the art at published size (via Heritage Auctions ha.com). Hand-written color codes such as B2, B3, YB2 and RB3 direct the color separation department.

In the early days of the Sundays, the color guide was often painted on the original artwork — after it had been photographed. In 1973 the Hulk color guide started as a printed B&W copy the same size as the comic; in later years it would simply be a reduced photocopy. We can see that this particular copy was made before some margin notes written on the original art, instructions to the colorist, were trimmed off the edges — and before the colorist's credit and typeset indicia were added. Sharp-eyed readers will also spot that the Hulk's right hand was redrawn.

More obvious than that are the hand-written codes scattered over the image: B2, B3, YB2, RB3 etc. — more on them in Part 2. These annotations make it clear that this is not artwork to be photographed or scanned directly for print — as does the imprecise, blotchy appearance of the coloring. So what happened next on the comic book 'production line'?

Maxwell Gaines, one of the founding fathers of comic books in the 1930s, wrote about their production in great detail in 1943 ^[6] — except that after the color guide stage, he simply added:

"Then the engraver's color separation department does its magic — entirely a hand operation — and the sets of four-color plates are made."

Magic? Well, maybe not. As the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke wrote:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

So what was the technology used in color-separating comic book artwork?

The Color Separation Problem

If we try to discover this by the usual methods, we are likely to run into a fundamental problem. Both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary tell us that the earliest known use of the term 'color separation' was in 1904, in the context of photographic methods. Herein lies the problem. Pretty much every source of information looks at color separation as a photographic method (later supplanted by scanning). For example, Merriam-Webster defines color separation as:

The isolation on separate photographic negatives by the use of color filters of the parts of a picture or design that are to be printed in the given colors.

But we know that comic book color guides were not photographed for print. In various places, at different times, comics did introduce photographic color separation of full-color painted artwork, or the related blue-line method — e.g. the Franco-Belgian Tintin in the 1940s; Britain's Eagle in the 1950s; France's Metal Hurlant in the 1970s.

Here's a 1966 British example: Thunderbirds, with art by Frank Bellamy, scanned from the centre pages of TV Century 21, printed by rotogravure. Yellow, magenta and cyan were photographed through color filters; the black separation was probably made using state-of-the-art infrared photography.

Art by Frank Bellamy for Thunderbirds, scanned from the centre pages of TV Century 21 (1966), printed by rotogravure. This British example used photographic color separation via color filters, in contrast to the hand-separation methods standard in American comics.

But Marvel and DC only turned to full-color artwork in the 1980s with Hulk! magazine and The Dark Knight Returns respectively. Old-school US comics, of course, did not have full-color artwork which could be photographed or scanned to extract its colors. The black printing plate has been accounted for. Cyan, magenta and yellow had to be added somehow.

So what process was used to add color to that 1973 Hulk page? How was that color guide translated into printing plates? In fact the 1970s method was the third of three major old-school color separation technologies.

Three Colors, Three Eras, Three Dominant Methods

In the 1890s the red, yellow and blue color plates were indeed made 'entirely [by] a hand operation', as Maxwell Gaines said — a process called 'Ben Day's shading mediums', later abbreviated in the comics world to 'Ben Day dots'. However by the time Gaines wrote that in 1943 the comics industry had largely given up Ben Day for a new process, Craftint Multicolor, which mixed hand-crafting and photoengraving. There was a second major switch in the mid-1950s to a process using painted acetate sheets, which lasted until the mid-1980s.

Those three predominant color separation processes matched up closely with three eras of US comics; Ben Day in the Platinum Age (e.g. Little Nemo, below left), Craftint (center, Oswald Rabbit) in the Golden Age, and the acetate method in the Silver and Bronze Ages (right… Fantastic Four).

Three comic panels illustrating the three eras and their corresponding separation methods: Left: Ben Day dots (Platinum Age), Center: Craftint Multicolor (Golden Age), Right: the painted acetate method (Silver/Bronze Age).

This evolving separation technology played an enormous role in the evolution of the old-school comics aesthetic, which noticeably shifted with each "improvement" in color separation processes and technology.

Minor spoiler: the true comic book aesthetic arguably arrived with Craftint Multicolor in the 1930s, when the comic book business made the break from the Sunday newspaper industry.

In Part 2, I'll be taking you on a deep dive into the specifics of how colour separations were made during these three eras of comic book printing. Don't miss it. ^[7]

Footnotes

[1] The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide will tell you that something called Dell's 'Four Color' series was published from 1939–1962 — possibly a tactic to encourage completist collectors to try for a full set. While the numbering was sequential, the title of the comic changed from issue to issue; a wide variety from Donald Duck to Dick Tracy. Only from 1941–1946 did the subtitle 'Four color comic' appear on the cover in relatively small type.

[2] And if you can also explain exactly how it happened, you can have all the no-prizes! Because I can't figure it out.

[3] I'm forever grateful to Paul Gravett, who gifted me this half-page Yellow Kid some years ago.

[4] For detailed accounts of these origins, especially speech balloons but so much more, these three books are highly recommended: Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945; Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay; Eike Exner, Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History. David Carrier's The Aesthetics of Comics explains why the speech balloon is an essential part of his philosophical account of the comic strip aesthetic.

[5] See footnote 4.

[6] This page has some details of Gaines's two-part article in Print magazine, and another in Fortune, but links to the full texts no longer work (boo, hiss, etc.): Rare Vintage Articles About Comics And The Comic Book Industry – PRINT Magazine.

[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.

Text copyright © Guy Lawley 2026
Images displayed for educational purposes only. All images copyright © their respective owners.

About the author

Guy Lawley is a blogger and comics historian. He is the author of Legion of Andy, widely considered to be the internet's foremost repository of information on the history of comic book printing and production techniques.