Color guides are one of the more unusual pieces of comic-book production artwork to survive from the pre-digital and transitional eras of the industry. To the casual observer, a color guide may look like a partially colored comic page. To a collector, however, it can represent something much more important: a physical record of how a comic was intended to look before the final colors appeared on the printed page.

For World of WildStorm, color guides are particularly interesting because they document a period of enormous technological change. During the 1990s, WildStorm’s books were being produced as the comic industry moved from traditional hand-colored guides and mechanical color separations toward computer-based coloring and digital production.

WildStorm’s color guides also have a human history. Among the artists and production personnel associated with this work, Joe Chiodo and Wendy Fouts-Broome handled much of the heavy lifting for WildStorm color guides during the 1990s, with Joe Rosas also making contributions, among others. Their work provides an important connection between the physical, hand-produced color guides of the era and the increasingly digital coloring operation that developed around them.

What Is A Color Guide?

A color guide is a piece of production artwork used to communicate the intended colors of a comic-book page to the people responsible for preparing the artwork for printing.

Before digital coloring became standard, colorists commonly worked on reproductions of the artwork rather than on the original pencil-and-ink page. Often, the guides were made from scans of the final inked pages. As a time saving trick during tight deadlines, occasionally they would be prints of just the pencils, so that the guides could be simultaneously produced while the original pages were being inked. These reproductions could be photostats, photocopies, or other production copies. The colorist would then apply color by hand, often using transparent dyes, markers, watercolor, airbrush, or other media.

The finished guide provided a visual reference for the computer coloring team and the color-separation process. Notes, color codes, and other markings could be added to communicate information that could not be conveyed by the artwork alone.

This distinction is important when collecting comic art. A color guide is not the same thing as the original inked artwork, a color proof, or a printed comic page. It is a separate piece of the production process, created for a specific purpose.

For much of the twentieth century, color guides were an essential bridge between the black-and-white artwork and the printed comic.

Before Digital Coloring

For decades, American comic books were printed using a limited four-color process based on cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, commonly referred to as CMYK.

The technology imposed significant limitations on the colorist. The range of colors that could be reproduced economically and consistently on comic-book paper was far smaller than the range available to an artist working with paints or other traditional media.

Colorists therefore worked within established color systems and communicated those choices to the production department. Color guides could contain numbered or coded indications showing which combinations of printing inks and percentages were intended.

The guide was not necessarily intended to reproduce the exact appearance of the finished comic when viewed by itself. Its primary purpose was to communicate the colorist’s intentions to the production and separation process.

This is one reason traditional color guides can look strange to modern eyes. Areas that appear flat, garish, or incomplete may have been perfectly appropriate for the production process of their time.

The guide was a working document.

The Color Separation Process

The separation process converted the color information from the guide into the individual printing plates or films needed to reproduce the page.

In the traditional process, this could involve a combination of mechanical techniques, photographic processes, film, overlays, and carefully controlled color indications.

The color guide therefore occupied an important position between the artist and the printer.

A simplified version of the traditional workflow might look like this:

Pencils → Inks → Color Guide → Color Separations → Printing → Finished Comic

The actual production process was considerably more complicated, and different publishers and production houses used different methods over time. But the basic idea remains useful: the color guide was a communication tool between the creative artwork and the mechanical production process.

The People Behind WildStorm’s Color Guides

The history of WildStorm color guides is not simply a story about technology. It is also a story about the people who physically produced the guides.

During the 1990s, Joe Chiodo and Wendy Fouts-Broome were responsible for a significant amount of WildStorm’s color-guide work, with Joe Rosas also having made contributions.

This is an important distinction when looking at surviving WildStorm production material.

The people responsible for a finished comic’s printed colors were not necessarily the same people responsible for every stage of the physical color-guide process. A color guide could be created as part of a larger production workflow involving artists, colorists, separators, coordinators, and eventually the computer-coloring staff.

Joe Chiodo and Wendy Fouts-Broome are particularly recognizable throughout WildStorm’s 1990s credits. Their names appear repeatedly in the coloring credits of WildStorm publications, sometimes alongside assistants and other personnel like Martin Jimenez and the WildStorm FX team.

Joe Rosas likewise represents another piece of that largely undocumented production history.

For collectors, these names are significant because they help establish that a surviving physical guide is not simply an anonymous piece of production paperwork. It can be evidence of the work performed by specific members of WildStorm’s coloring and production staff.

The Computer Revolution

The late 1980s and early 1990s brought a major change to comic-book coloring.

Computers began to make it possible to create, manipulate, and separate colors digitally. Instead of physically painting a reproduction of the artwork and then translating those colors through a separate mechanical process, colorists could increasingly work directly within a digital environment.

One of the early and important examples of this transition was Steve Oliff‘s work on Akira for Marvel’s Epic Comics line. Oliff and his company Olyoptics were among the pioneers of computer-based coloring and digital color separations. The process demonstrated that computers could be used to achieve a much wider range of color and tonal effects than the traditional limited palette.

The change did not happen overnight.

During the early 1990s, traditional and digital methods existed alongside one another. Different publishers, studios, and production teams adopted computers at different rates, and individual books could involve multiple approaches.

This transitional period is one of the reasons 1990s comic production material is so interesting to collectors today.

WildStorm And Computer Coloring

WildStorm was at the forefront of the changes taking place in comic-book production during the 1990s.

As the studio expanded its output, computer-based coloring and production became increasingly important to the company’s workflow. The credits of WildStorm books from this period provide an unusually useful record of that development.

WildStorm’s production group was credited as WildStorm FX (sometimes written as WildStorm Effects). These credits appear in numerous books from the period and identify a substantial group of artists and production personnel.

For example, Wetworks #3, published in 1994, credits “Computer Coloring and Production: WildStorm Effects.” The issue’s credits identify a number of people working under the WildStorm Effects name.

The 1994 Wildstorm Swimsuit Special similarly credits “Computer color: Electric Crayon, and WildStorm Effects,” followed by a lengthy list of WildStorm Effects personnel.

By 1995, WildStorm’s computer-coloring operation was deeply integrated into the production of its comics.

It is important, however, not to treat the emergence of WildStorm FX as meaning that traditional color-guide work immediately disappeared. For a period, the two approaches existed side by side.

The WildStorm FX Team

One of the most interesting things about WildStorm FX is that it was not simply a single colorist working under a studio name.

The credits from each comic issue show a sizable team. The following list is not definitive, but it illustrates the scope of the coloring team WildStorm assembled to produce their books.

Mike Albano	Kevin Angus	David Baron	Joel Benjamin
Nick Bell	Alex Bleyaert	Ray Britt	Jessie Buddell
Alex Carbonero	Claudia Chong	Robert Chong	Jeromy Cox
Joe Damon	Ben Dimagmaliw	Joe Dunn	Tad Ehrlich
Ben Fernandez	Speed Farris	Wendy Fouts-Broome	Chris Garcia
Michael Garcia	Robert Garretson	Eric Guerrero	Ian Hannin
Andy Hartnell	James LaRue	Tanya Laib	Laura DePuy (Martin)
Matthew Milla	Christian Milos	Paul Mobbs	Jason Morlon
Peter Pantazis	Todd Parsons	Justin Ponsor	Chris Provinzano
Tobias Queck	Homer Reyes	David A. Rodriguez	James Rochelle
Robert Ro	Darlene Royer	Jessica Ruffner	Alex Sinclair
Steve Lukas	John Uhrich	Carlos Vasquez	Anthony Washington

This is an important distinction when discussing the history of WildStorm coloring.

WildStorm FX was a team and production operation, not simply a name attached to one person’s work.

The surviving credits also show that different people could have different responsibilities. Some are identified as computer colorists, some as color-separation personnel, and others as coordinators or production staff.

That larger production structure existed alongside the artists who were creating the physical color guides.

WildStorm FX And Color Separations

The relationship between computer coloring and color separation is especially interesting.

The credits for Gen 13 #2, for example, distinguish between Olyoptics handling color separations on some pages and WildStorm FX personnel handling computer color coordination and color separations on others. The issue credits Jessica Ruffner as computer color coordinator and numerous WildStorm FX members for color separations on the pages assigned to the group.

This provides a fascinating glimpse into the transitional nature of comic production during this period.

The computer was not simply replacing one isolated part of the old process. Digital production was gradually changing the relationship between coloring, separation, and printing.

By the mid-1990s, these jobs could overlap considerably.

At the same time, physical color guides remained a tangible part of WildStorm’s production history, particularly in the work associated with Joe Chiodo, Wendy Fouts-Broome, Joe Rosas, and others involved in producing guides.

The Transition From Guides To Digital Files

As coloring moved into the computer, the traditional physical color guide gradually lost its central production role.

If the colorist was working digitally, there was no longer necessarily a physical hand-colored page that needed to be passed along to a separator as the primary color reference.

The production information could instead exist as digital files.

This fundamentally changed the nature of comic-book production artwork.

A traditional color guide was a physical artifact because the production process required one.

A digital color file could perform many of the same functions without leaving behind a unique physical object.

That makes surviving physical color guides from earlier periods, and especially from the transitional years, particularly interesting to collectors.

They preserve a piece of a production process that was rapidly disappearing.

Why WildStorm Color Guides Matter

WildStorm’s 1990s output occupies an important place in the history of American comics.

The studio was associated with highly detailed artwork, sophisticated rendering, and an increasingly digital production environment. Its books arrived during a period when computer technology was changing not only how comics were colored, but how they were produced as a whole.

A WildStorm color guide can therefore represent more than the colors of a single comic page.

It can document:

• The intended appearance of a page
• The work of the colorist
• The transition between traditional and digital production
• Production markings and instructions
• The relationship between the artwork and the printing process
• The working methods of WildStorm’s production staff
• The technological changes taking place within the comic industry
• The work of talented individuals such as Joe Chiodo and Wendy Fouts-Broome

For collectors of WildStorm production material, these objects provide a physical connection to a period that is otherwise increasingly represented by digital files and printed reproductions.

The World Of WildStorm Color Guide Archive

The World of WildStorm physical archive includes examples of WildStorm production material that help document this period of change.

The examples shown here are particularly valuable because they allow the production process to be examined through surviving physical artifacts rather than only through credits or recollections.

While a comic may have been printed in hundreds of thousands of copies, the production materials used to create it may have existed as only one physical example.