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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
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Posted: 28 June 2016 at 7:31am | IP Logged | 1  

The second and fourth panels, above, illustrate a couple of points from days of yore.

In that full figure shot of Jean, the emblem on her belt is nothing more than a circle with an X in it. Not even a well rendered or balanced X. The inker (Paul Reinman) just drew an X, like a Hillbilly making his mark. And that was probably all Kirby had drawn in the first place. (Did he expect the inker to embellish it? Probably not. Given the speed with which these things were cranked out, and the shorthand conventions of the time, we're lucky Jean and the rest of the team didn't end up with black circles for belt buckles.*)

In the fourth image, third panel, Wolverine has a white band down the right side (our left) of his face. Whether it was the colorist or the separator who did this, it is a classic case of Stop At A Line coloring, which can be SO frustrating when the one doing it misinterprets the shot. There is no contextual reason for Wolverine's cheek to be white. The shading on Jean's dress clearly shows the light is coming from the other direction, and even were it not, there would be no white on Logan's costume just there. The flesh color of his face should have been continued into the strip. (Not that the separator also missed the blue on his epaulet, to the left of his hand.)

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* For the benefit of those who do not know, it was common for pencilers to indicate black areas with an X or two in the space. Famously, the wife of a BEETLE BAILEY inker, helping her husband spot black, gave all the soldiers black collars, interpreting the crossed rifles of the Infantry as Xs. )Some modern pencilers fill the black spaces with so many Xs I wonder why they don't just turn the pencil on its side and black the area fully!)

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Doug Centers
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Posted: 28 June 2016 at 8:03am | IP Logged | 2  

"In the fourth image, third panel, Wolverine has a white band down the right side (our left) of his face. Whether it was the colorist or the separator who did this, it is a classic case of Stop At A Line coloring, which can be SO frustrating when the one doing it misinterprets the shot"

...

I noticed that too. At first it looked like the colorist was trying to use the same effect that was used on Jean's dress from the first panel but it just didn't make sense.

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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

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Posted: 28 June 2016 at 8:14am | IP Logged | 3  

More often it was the separators who were at fault. In Ye Olden Days, the process was a literal assembly line, with rows of "housewives" sitting at benches with trancing paper over xeroxes, each assigned to blacking out one color (CMYK, in different percentages). Staggeringly boring work, which tended to lead to minds not fully focused on the job.

This was why Superman's costume would occasionally turn green, when the Y lady laid down color where it was not supposed to be. And in one infamous case it led to Spider-Man losing his pants, when the C that was added to the Y2R2 to create the distinctive color was left out, and only the skin tones remained!!

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Marc Cheek
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Posted: 28 June 2016 at 11:16am | IP Logged | 4  

As someone who bought X-men 137 off the spinner rack, the death of Phoenix was something that I couldn't have anticipated. It was shocking to my 13-year old mind!
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Peter Hicks
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Posted: 28 June 2016 at 11:37am | IP Logged | 5  


More often it was the separators who were at fault
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Is this why the Sentinels were repeatedly orange instead of grey? X-Men 15 and 99, Avengers 104....
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John Byrne
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Posted: 28 June 2016 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | 6  

Repeated coloring mistake often happened because the most recent previous appearance was used, and if there was a mistake there, it was perpetuated.

Once upon a time, being told again that the coloring mistakes in a book he edited were due to this, Roger Stern stormed down to where reference materials were kept and clear out all the inaccurate stuff he could find.

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