Electric Crayon was a digital coloring company founded by
Steve Buccellato
Steve Buccellato (born May 1968) is a freelance artist and self-publisher who has worked in the comics industry as a colorist
In comics, a colorist is responsible for adding color to black-and-white line art. For most of the 20th century thi ...
, Marc Siry and Douglas Rosen in 1992. Based in Santa Monica, California, Electric Crayon mainly served the US comic book industry, providing digital color separations for many popular Marvel, DC, and Image titles, including
Generation X
Generation X (often shortened to Gen X) is the Demography, demographic Cohort (statistics), cohort following the Baby Boomers and preceding Millennials. Researchers and popular media often use the mid-1960s as its starting birth years and the ...
,
Astro City
''Astro City'', also known as ''Kurt Busiek's Astro City'', is an American superhero anthology comic book series centered on a fictional American city of that name. Created and written by Kurt Busiek, the series is mostly illustrated by Brent And ...
, and the one-shot Batman/Punisher crossover.
Electric Crayon was notable for two reasons:
Although Image Comics and other independent companies (such as Steve Oliff's Olyoptics) had pioneered digital color separations, they were typically focused on special projects or boutique publishers. Electric Crayon attempted to bring the greater detail and color fidelity available through digital separations to mainstream comics, typically known for coarsely screened hand separations.
Electric Crayon was founded shortly after
Richard Starking's
Comicraft
Comicraft is a company which provides graphic design and lettering services to various (primarily comic book) companies.
History
The company was founded by Richard Starkings in 1992. Starkings had been working for Marvel UK for five years, but ...
, and occupied the same office building for a time. This led to the creation of new efficiencies in the comic book production process, where the dialogue balloons containing the lettering were composed onto the finished color art. This allowed the lettering work to happen in parallel to the inking, rather than as a serial process, compressing the time necessary to produce a finished digital file for printing.
Electric Crayon operated for slightly over a year as a comic book coloring company. Eventually, the mounting costs of archival hard disk storage and the slow computers of the time made it impractical for the company to scale without either selling to a larger company or raising rates beyond what the market would pay.
[ at the ]Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
, Mar 13, 2007. Buccellato and Siry sold their interest to Rosen and proceeded to form a creative studio,
Mad Science Media
Mad, mad, or MAD may refer to:
Geography
* Mad (village), a village in the Dunajská Streda District of Slovakia
* Mád, a village in Hungary
* Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport, by IATA airport code
* Mad River (disambiguation), several ri ...
, focused on content publishing.
References
Bringing culture to comics: Buccellato talks 'Comiculture'The Truth Is Out There (Part 5): Lee Loughridge & Brian Bucellato talk "Fear Agent"
Notes
Comics studios
{{comics-stub