New Brevoort Formspring

It goes back to the very beginning, before comic books themselves, really, when mass-reproduction of text and images became a reality. In order to reproduce an image well, it needed to be rendered in black ink. And with your key artists, you’d want them to be able to do more faster, so assistants were brought in. Sometimes those assistants did the inking, other times they might do the tight pencils from loose layouts and the key artist would do the final inking. But it was a production issue, to speed up workflow and to get more work out of the same key people. Coloring even more so. For years, comics publishers didn’t even bother with the coloring, it was all handled by the engravers. But as time went on and different creators and publishers became more concerned about the look of their final product, doing coloring was brought in house–but it was seldom done by the key creators, for the same reasons given above.