(When I started 3D modeling, one of the first things I discovered was a setting called "Specular" in the color controls. This actually allowed the creation of comic-like coloring, as I could make a surface shiny black and give it a blue specular setting, and, lo and behold, the highlights were blue. Or green. Or yellow. Whatever I wanted!)

BTW, what color is my dog?

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Granted, organized fandom did not exist when I was a kid, so I had no way of knowing what other readers were thinking. When I had my mother make a Batman costume for me for Halloween, I chose blue for the cape and cowl, etc. That was the color in the comics, and I had no access to the history that would show me it was really black. Even the reprints in the Annuals (which I did not know were reprints) had his costume blue and grey.

Spider-Man, tho, I "met" when he was wearing red and black. My introduction to the X-Men had them in yellow and black.

But I understood that Superman's hair was not blue, and it was not until I was an adult and entering the business that I started hearing people ask why "everyone couldn't tell" that Clark and Superman were the same, since "they both have blue hair." Lois had blue hair, too, but nobody seemed to be bothered by that.

I quickly realized it was something that had become an affectation in the aging fans. Those ennui-engorge losers who were addicted, so could not quit, but had to proclaim their superiority to their addiction by mocking it.

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Only a little one.

You've been caught by the changes that happened, rather haphazardly, to various characters over the years. When I returned to reading comics, in the early Seventies, I was surprised to find the non-red part of Spider-Man's costume had turned blue.* When I was assigned to draw the character, I made those parts black, and no one objected.

Many characters have been sucked into that same swamp that has affected movies like PLANET OF THE APES, STAR WARS or THE MATRIX. Later iterations so altered the story/characters that the originals no longer fit.

The most outrageous example was when I was getting ready to do Captain Marvel, at DC. A young artist asked me what I was working on, and when I told him he said "Oh, I'm a purist. I call him Shazam."

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* Actually, blue over the standard caucasian flesh tones, so more of a deep purple.

This can make for embarrassing moments for our friendly neighborhood webslinger. I recall one panel in which the blue was left out, and Spider-Man was widdout pants!!

I wanted Northstar and Aurora to have very shiny black hair, so I asked that no color be put on the hightlights. Fine--except other artists started drawing them with white hair, and, in one case I saw, the colorist made this yellow/blond!

Years later, at DC, when I was working on GENERATIONS 2 I happened by chance to be in the editor's office when the coloring came in for one of the covers. As some of you may recall, in G2 I had a Supergirl with black hair, and a Robin with blond. The colorist had "fixed" this, putting yellow highlights on Supergirl's hair, and making Robin's hair blue. Luckily there was still time to fix it, but the editor, whose job it was to catch such things, had not noticed.