Back in the day, comics were printed in four colors — good old cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (also known as CYMK). But this is the future, with digital coloring nearly standard. The availability of modern technology to the industry gives us such a wide variety of colors and effects that we can often lose sight of a little something I like to call ‘The Fifth Color’.

And not because that sounds really pretentious.

While the creators and printer use all these awesome tricks and palettes to convey their intent and interpretation to the reader, it’s the reader who can actually throw the entire process off by coloring what he sees by what he knows. Readers are the Fifth Color, because what you and I read on the page is the final step in getting what the story is about.

It’s just part of writing and storytelling. After all, these are ‘adolescent power fantasies’, right? Shouldn’t we be able to read superheroic deeds and see a little of ourselves in the picture? Writers are told in nearly ever beginner’s writing class to ‘write what you know,’ the idea that if you can connect something of yourself to what you’re putting down on the paper, the reader can do the same.

Now, if your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man stops living in your neighborhood and stops being quite so friendly as an enforcer of the government, that’s an entirely new shade the writer is trying to communicate, and our eyes need time to adjust. As the eye has a problem going from red to green, if some simple gradients are put in there, the transition can almost seem natural. That need for transition is in part why there are ‘Continuity Nazis’ and people who refer back issues and issues to note that excuse me, Spider-Man mutated and died during the Disassembled issues in Spectacular Spider-Man #19, so how does this reflect on the Other death and new powers situation during the JMS’s Other storyline? What came before helps us understand what’s coming now and is an active part of the Fifth Color that shades an entire book, sometimes despite the writer’s interpretation. Marvel has been very up front on saying that they want a balanced look at the Superhero Registration Act and that there are no ‘villains’ per se in the story, just different points of view between heroes.

But that’s really hard to do when you see Captain America on one side of the argument. The reader is going to color the book with his or her own thoughts and opinions on a guy who wears the American flag and, quite honestly, whose solo book has been awesome and on time, versus Iron Man, who’s currently assassinating people against his will in his own title and has been portrayed as overly aggro to his teammates and friends on this political issue. Is it fair to read one character’s book with the interpretations from another? Well, that’s kind of the editor’s job to make sure everything flows through the collective universe from one book to the next, but fair or not, it’s going to happen.

Now, the best of writers will tap into the resource and work with it rather than against it. Peter David’s now infamous explanation of Quicksilver’s attitude problem went directly with how he’d been written and how we the reader might feel in the same situation. When Geoff Johns wrote the Search for She-Hulk storyline for the Avengers, he explained that Jennifer Walter’s issues that led to her change from mousy lawyer to radioactive green powerhouse came from fear rather than her cousin’s anger issues. Reading back, you can kind of see where a woman shot as a warning to someone else might want to stay in a very protective Amazonian form. This is played with by Dan Slott in the first ’season’ so to speak of the new She-Hulk, where she’s learning to deal with both sides of herself and coming to appreciate both. This kind of stuff is great because readers already have the palette to work with, the colors and info are already set, we know this character. Writers can reach into that Fifth Color, to keep turning a phrase here, to involve the reader, inform us of their point and, best of all, entertain us for our $2.99.

And that’s where I’m coming from. When it all comes down to it, we the reader are the last, best line of defense for what we want. Blame writers and artists and companies and editors all you like, but the Fifth Color is really the heart of it, how readers can take all of the above and make it stick.

Ain’t comics grand?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Comic Books, Industry, Marvel, The Fifth Color. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.