My Favorite Strips To Color

Most of you know that I (Anne) color the strip - 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

That's a lot of coloring.

My mother recently gave me a book of Mandalas to color in as a meditative exercise - "Are you serious?! Do you realize I already spend 10 hours a week coloring things? It's like I live in a never ending Kindergarten!" (I did not actually say this to her - but I seriously thought about it.)

But, despite all that coloring, for 7 years now (Edison begins year 8 on November 6 2013) I still LOVE this job.

Sure, probably 80% of Edison readers only see my work on Sundays - very few papers across the country run daily comics in color - but I still love doing it. Especially when I see the color on the internet where it is backlit, adding more dimension to the strip. (Except for on Arcamax. They do something funky to the color as is evidenced here:

Note that the purple is more neon as are the blues and greens in panel 2

My absolute favorite strips to color are the ones that happen in the lab. Outdoor scenes require fairly faithful representations of real world color, as do scenes that happen in the family home and school. But the lab can look like ANYTHING. It's also the space where John gives me 100% autonomy over color. (I have 90% over the other scenes - like I said before, they have to be fairly realistic.)

I did not do the color for the first three months of the strip back in 2006 - but once I took over I quickly decided I wanted the lab to be a place that really popped and sizzled. Hence the use of bold primary colors and backgrounds consisting mainly of blue, green, and yellow/orange vignettes. As you can see here in a Sunday page that ran April 11 of 2010 (sadly, this strip could have been published yesterday - still true)

I've been asked where I got the inspiration to color Edison strips this way and my answer is twofold - Marvel Comics and Warner Brothers Loony Toons. I remember as a kid being totally knocked out by the color in Loony Toons - especially the Chuck Jones cartoons with Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers etc. And I also remember that the Marvel Comic Books I read had way more fabulous color than Batman or Superman.

So, when you read an average daily comic set in the family living room - sure, I enjoyed coloring that. But when you see the stuff in the lab - I enjoyed the hell out of coloring THAT :-)