Buy The Wedding of Popeye and Olive - a classic! Find out more here. $9+$1SH

Buy Sparky and Tim, the kid and dog book from Warner and Brubaker with Gary's cover! Find out more here. $4+$1SH

Buy Aaron Strips 1, 2, 5 and 6! Find out more here. $4+$1SH

Buy Adventures of Aaron 1, 2 and 3! Find out more here. $3+$1SH

The most important starting point for colorists today is to realize that you are the technical link between printer and artist. Remember that as a colorist, you must understand how ink goes on a press.

Budding colorists should study older comics to understand printing techniques. Pre-80s books used cyan, magenta and yellow overlays cut from rubylith to produce color over the black line art. I've done some of this, and let me tell you, those unsung guys at the print shops cutting color were masters. Some of my favorites are the first 100 Fantastic Fours and '60s Thors. Tales from the Crypt are great -- Marie Severin used simple solids to set a great mood. (Her coloring was even imitated in the first Creepshow movie, which was a sendup of EC comics. Stephen King and George Romero -- what a combination.)

Life is also a great influence. Sunsets! Woods in the fall! Deep water in a storm, shallow on a spring day! The city at night! Learn to see what colors are working together in life. Believe me, God knows what he's doing.

Look beyond comic books for influences. Hit the library for picture books about painters (The oversized book section is a good place to find the color). Chagall was a great colorist -- solids in a painterly fashion. If you ever get a chance to see Van Gogh and Matisse paintings first hand, do it. No printing press can reproduce those wonderful dots of color that shimmer and blend together when you step back.

I found several of those large Disney Studios books celebrating their recent cartoons on sale last year -- another great place to look for color. Those Disney colorists really know their stuff. Even the minor cartoons (a hot tub scene in The Goofy Movie comes to mind) have excellent scenes to study. This studio has effective color down to a science.

I've recently rediscovered Herge's Tintin graphic novels. These were done in the early 1950s and have since been translated into 31 languages and distributed in 44 countries. Europe has always been known for fine printing (check out the first couple of years of Heavy Metal magazine, taken from a magazine started in Europe) and Herge is an excellent colorist. And all he used were well-chosen solids! Even the lettering is beautiful. The plots are adventurous and compelling, but not overly violent (although death does occur). My favorites are the early ones, where Tintin's dog, Snowy, talked. Tintin was the only one who seemed to hear him. Can you believe there was an honest-to-God graphic novel series that sold worldwide in 1950? The first "comic" I remember reading, way before Strange Tales or Detective Comics, was a beat up hardcover Tintin at my grade school.

Speaking of Heavy Metal, another artist colorists should look at is Daniel Torres, a Spanish artist/writer who I first discovered in '80s Heavy Metals. His color choices are similar to Herge's, defining the figures with bright colors that, for some reason, don't really register in my brain as bright until I stop to analyze them. Unlike Herge, Torres uses his brush to shape and mold things. He comes up with some really dynamic color choices.

Enough of what to look AT, what do you look FOR?

Look at how artists separate foreground, middleground and background. This is also your primary job coloring comics. Look at how they handle textures -- leather, wood, metal (The Flemish Baroque portrait painters like van Dyke from the 1630s, for instance. Not only does cloth look like cloth, you can tell what KIND of cloth). In art and life, study light.

Above all else, be true to your artist's vision. Coloring should complement, not control, the artist's work.