Unpopular take: I actually miss the old digital coloring from the 90s

I noticed a clear before-and-after difference in Batman comics around 2002. The colors went from those flat, vibrant fills to this overly glossy, 3D shaded look that makes everything feel like a plastic toy. I think it was the rise of Photoshop filters and artists chasing that video game aesthetic. Has anyone else noticed how those old coloring styles had more personality and pop, or am I just stuck in the past?

3 comments

3 Comments

margaretc421d ago

You really went deep on this one, huh? It's comic book coloring, not a cultural crisis. I get nostalgia for the old flat style, it had its charm for sure, but calling the glossy look a plastic toy problem feels like a stretch. Those 90s comics also had their share of terrible colors that looked like someone sneezed neon all over the page. Maybe the real issue is that you just got used to what you grew up with.

knight.uma1d ago

Over in the old coloring film days, my buddy @margaretc42 worked at a printshop that used those old CMYK separations for everything. He'd tell me about the hell of getting those bright reds to not look orange on cheap paper. Made me appreciate that flat 90s Batmobile red a lot more knowing it was a battle to even get that color without bleeding into the blue.

patricia_hill601d ago

Remember going to the comic shop back then and flipping through the new releases? There was this one Batman issue where the colors were so flat and bright it looked like someone had photocopied the pages with a bad printer. I remember thinking "this is what we're paying for?" My friend collected those issues religiously though, said the bright colors made the characters pop off the page. Now I look back and see where you're coming from, those modern comics with all the shading do feel slick and kind of cold sometimes. But I also remember plenty of 90s books where the coloring was just a muddy mess, especially on newsprint. So maybe we're both half right, and the sweet spot was somewhere in between.