Light, colour and shade

Comics can be in colour or black and white. They can be basically all black and white apart from deliberate use of a single colour for a certain effect. They can be heavy on the inking, creating a lot of shadow, or not much inking at all.

Colour can be used for a range of purposes. On one level, it helps the reader further tell the characters apart, makes the settings clearer and makes the drawings more appealing.

For example, here’s the original black and white drawings of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

And here’s a more recent version, in colour:

Here colour is used to help convey aspects of character. The woman, Ramona Flowers, constantly dyes her hair – an aspect used by the creator, Bryan Lee O’Malley – to get across Ramona’s impulsive nature.

Colour can also be used to create a certain tone or atmosphere to the work. Think about the difference between three superhero movies, The Incredibles, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight.

The Incredibles is very brightly lit with strong, bold colours, which suits the child audience, the Iron Man movies are also quite bright and colourful but with moments of heavy shadow, while Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight series is deliberately dark, with a lot of shadow and cold colours to create a gritty, realistic and menacing tone throughout the whole series.

Here, the colour is very washed out and grainy, probably to create a very specific tone. A gritty, realistic tone which seems to fit the nature of the story which looks like it will be a war story.

Colour may also be used symbolically.

In this panel from the beautiful masterpiece that is Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, a middle-aged man contemplates mortality. The scene is coloured to look like a sunset, but when you consider the nature of the narrative boxes, this colouring takes on a symbolic purpose, representing the mortality that the man is coming to terms of. The sunset of his life. He is, however, also surrounded by heavy shadows which represents the grim nature of such a topic but, he is also within the green of the grass which symbolises life and – for this character – the idea that he will be making the most of his life from this point on. (The children playing with the kites in the background probably also symbolises the idea that life continues…)