NYC Lecture: New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium: Featuring Guy Lawley

 

New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium: Featuring Guy Lawley

Guy Lawley on Comics, color and “Ben Day dots.”

 

  • Ben Day dots are colored dots commonly found in older comic books
    • INvented by 1879 by Benjamin Day
  • 1890’s-1980’s
    • Four color letterpress printing on newspaper
    • Rotary web perfecting press (1871)
  • Comics shift from newspaper to Comic Books
    • Originally printed on newspaper instead of better quality paper
    • Even the glossy papered comics of today are printed with dots
  • Roy Lichtenstein
    • NYU based artist uses ben day dots to create large scale comic paintings
    • Controversial artist due to the fact that he appears to steal content
    • Many artists go about trying to take the dots back from Lichtenstein for the comics
  • Four color printing
    • Cyan
    • Magenta
    • Yellow
    • Key
  • Color Separation
    • Creating images for the different color plates
    • There are two ways to separate color   
      • Photographic color separation
        • A full color image broken down into separate colors for printing
        • Used through the 1980’s for US comic color
      • Mechanical Color Separation
        • Extremely hands on method
        • Always begins with a color guide  
      • Three different color separation techniques
        • Ben Day Tints – “Platinum Age” Sundays
          • Ben Day Screen: Wooden Frame with clear celluloid and patterned with dots or lines as to avoid hand drawing each dot
          • This allowed for precisely controlled multiple applications of Ben Day dots

“They could never have created the industry that we have today if they kept Benday men only. They had to find faster ways of making the [colour] separations.”  – Sol Harrison

        • Craftint Multicolor – in comic book s from 1934
          • Takes color separation away from the metal plate and onto the drawing board
          • This method didn’t have as many options
            • “64 colors”
        • Acetate – Marvel 1954 DC 1956
          • Made through acetate sheets that were painted over to show where each color should be and then those are turned into printing plates and combined into one for mass printing.
          • 25% dots are colored dots on white paper
          • 50% dots are white dots on colored paper
  • Real Ben Day dots had phased out starting in the mid 1930’s
    • It became a generalized brand name like band-aid or kleenex