[crashryan]

I puzzled over the color in this book. Comic books used black plus tints of red, yellow, and blue to create its limited color pallet.



A common printing error was not printing one of the colors--for example, forgetting the red plate would make faces print yellow (white skin was typically a light yellow overlaid with a tint of red). At first I thought that in this book the printer forgot the yellow plate. But then there shouldn't be any greens (blue+yellow), and there are plenty of greens here



My theory is that for some reason Charlton chose to use a dark grey-green ink instead of blue. I'm guessing that the color in the background of page 6, panel 2 is the 100% shade. They also omitted the yellow plate, resulting in the comic's weird color scheme.



The only flaw with this theory is that the first three pages and two random interior pages do have the yellow plate. Comics were printed on large sheets, four pages on each side. These were folded in quarters, stapled, and trimmed to make 32 pages. For this reason printing errors generally show up on four pages at a time and are mirrored...e.g. a missing plate on page 1 will also be missing on page 32. This comic doesn't follow that rule.



What's left? That Charlton had a few barrels of weird green ink lying around and, being cheapskates, used it instead of blue; then somehow their printer forgot to make yellow films for 29 of the pages? Strange things happened at Derby, Connecticut. I'd love to hear other opinions.

Link to the book: True Life Secrets 03

[lyons]

Interesting analysis, crash.  Charlton was known for its low-budget practices, often using unpublished material acquired from defunct companies and paying comics creators among the lowest rates in the industry. Charlton Comics was also the last to raise their price from ten cents to 12 cents in 1962, and was unique among comic book companies in that it controlled all areas of publishing - from editorial to printing to distribution - rather than working with outside printers and distributors as did most other publishers - and doing it all under one roof at its Derby headquarters.