The Comics Page in Color and B&W

D. D. Degg January 24, 2023 1 minute 5 comments

…And maybe some grayscale.

Reading a daily comics page in black and white I was struck by gray toning in today’s Rose is Rose.

The amount of not-white was a pleasant change.

Dare I say that most of the daily comics in newspapers are now colorized? And so cartoonists seem to have forsaken the practice of black and white ART as their comics are mostly read in color online and are seldom seen in black and white anymore.

Here’s another part of that comics page where the above Rose is Rose appeared:

There is some more of the gray, but where’s the spotting of blacks?

A section from 50 years ago:

There is more black in those four strips than on the twenty strips combined in today’s Times West Virginian. It saddens me to see the b&w art stripped down to just the line.

But those that do use an amount of black ink stand out on the comics page:

Which is not to say that the daily color comics are bad. Rose is Rose in color:

That dark blue night against the shades of brown on the owl with the light blue shading of the snowman make for striking images. I’m guessing Don Wimmer does his own coloring on the dailies?

Comments ⁵

WIMMER DON

Thanks for the shoutout. Every Rose is Rose daily has a grey scale version. Yes, I do the coloring on all Rose is Rose strips.

Andréa

I agree – very striking.

Jan 25,2023

Joe Wos

I have to do Mazetoons in color and in black and white. I cannot just greyscale the color mazes because in that conversion the darker colors show up as black and would render the mazes unsolvable.

William Ramwell

Is Beetle Bailey really cheap? Because it’s out of time and place and rarely more than amusing. Yet so many papers Carry it.

Darryl Heine

The West Virginin still carries Cul De Sac in reruns?

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