Comic History Wayback Whensday: Origins of the Color in Comics Skip to commentsLeft: Ben Day dots, Center: Craftint Multicolor, Right: the painted acetate methodTrue Grit Texture Supply provides us with Guy Lawley’s history of the development of color in the Sunday Color Supplement and the comic books of the 20th Century in The Origins of Vintage Comics. Just about every illustrator on the planet has a soft spot for the warm, nostalgic aesthetic of vintage comics. The visible dot patterns, uneven, mis-registered print and cheap newspaper stock offer a stark contrast to modern offset printed comics and graphic novels. For all the love the aesthetic gets, few of us know how vintage comics came to look this way, or what technologies were used to print them. In part one of this two-part series, he’ll take you on a fascinating deep dive into the newspaper industry’s color printing arms race, the surprising origins of the speech balloon and an introduction to the comic color systems used by craftspeople who never set foot near a computer.