[BAD SIGNAL] Colour

[Warren Ellis]

bad signalME

Man, the rain is HAMMERING down today.  I am huddled
under the makeshift roof out here in the smoking pariah-
park, working on the WOLVERINE anime and chilling my
undercarriage on a metal chair.

Maybe thinking about b/w comics is a winter thing, eh?

I suspect part of my view of colour comics is mediated by
my experience as a reader of 2000AD as a kid, where
colour was only used in the centrespread, and therefore
associated with Spectacle.  Spaceships exploding in the
orbit of Jupiter, Judge Dredd yelling STUB GUN! as he
takes out a Sov flyer with an exotic rifle.  Colour = Spectacle.

Which is stoopid, obviously, but I think it's probably had an
effect on my work for colour.  And also, perhaps oddly, I
think most of my very favourite comics are b/w.

Thing is, this is a market that's long treated b/w comics as
inferior, or at least an inferior commercial proposition.  It's
taken Robert Kirkman five years to convince retailers to
order THE WAKING DEAD in anything like the numbers it
should be doing, because there is that old received wisdom
that b/w = minor sales.

How do you go about changing that, beyond the obvious of
just making the best story you can?  What do you do to the
unit to make it more attractive?  I'll admit to being a little
perverse in thinking (or at least trying on the idea) that a
b/w comic should have a b/w cover.  But maybe that launches
a line of design thought that culminates in the ideal, which
is making an object that people want to own.  That's one of
the two hooks you want to put into the early adopter, the
other being making a story people don't want to wait for.
An object people want to own, keep in their houses, be seen
with -- and, perhaps, an object that makes people want
to identify as a member of the audience of.  Which comes back
to how people interact with the object beyond the reading
of the story.

Rambled too long again.

-- W



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