Four-Color Fantasy

I've been thinking a lot lately about a kind of art that usually doesn't work. Specifically, full-color comic-book fantasy, especially from the 20th Century.

What folks generally think of as "classic" old school RPG art--like Russ Nicholson and David Sutherland--is related but it isn't this kind of art. Usually classic Old School is black and white and the pen technique is tuned to be in black-and-white--it is full of textures that would interfere with the sense of movement in a comic book. When old school art's in color it's usually painted. 

Either way it avoids the central problem of rendering fantasy or historical scenes in ink and reproducing that inky color on a midcentury comic book printing press--they have a real tough time with realistic colors. There's a reason superhero comics beat out fantasy, westerns, romance, war, horror and noir comics and quickly dominated the comics medium--the heroes' bright costumes looked a lot better in cheap reproduction than the subtler palette needed for more realistic work

A key figure in the development of this kind of art was Hal Foster, who did Prince Valiant.

Despite Foster's legendary ability to render in ink, the colors still give this a chintzy, cheap feel. Something in the human brain just knows this isn't right--and its not just the pink rocks. Compare that to a random (and equally luridly-colored) Spider-Man panel:

Spidey's bright costume heightens the entire scene, and somehow the blobs and tangles of quickly-rendered trees make more sense. Like watching an American movie set in France where everyone speaks English--once you've mentally accepted the major deviation from reality, the rest follows. Superheroes look right in this printing process in a way that other genres took a lot more effort to pull off. 

There were exceptions, of course, but they required either very judicious use of color or an audience willing to suspend disbelief.

If you saw Schwarzenegger's Conan wearing that bright blue shirt you'd laugh so hard they'd ask you to leave the theatre, but nearly every fantasy character in comics wore some version of that.

Some of you may remember the official TSR D&D comics--the insensitive way they handled the color of armor, leather, flesh, steel and all the other things you've got to include in a fantasy comic wasn't the only reason they sucked, but they sure didn't help:

But anyway, I'm not interested in the bad stuff, I'm interested in the good stuff--the art by people who managed to overcome the limitations of the medium to produce a new, weird kind of fantasy art not seen before--and not seen much since either.

First up: Esteban Maroto's rarely-seen Wolff with two F's, who managed to maintain this psychedelic palette through several installments published in a variety of magazines.

Charles Vess has done some work for official D&D and he did a Sabbath album cover, and some of this more recent work has a soft post-computer-coloring palette. However he did some cool Thor-adjacent stuff in Marvel Fanfare which fits the 4-Color Fantasy vibe to a T:

A hallmark of this kind of art is monsters done in all one bright psychedelic color. Here's a page Vess did back in the day for DC Challenge:

Alex Niño did a strip called Captain Fear in the '70s, later taken over by Walt Simonson:

Tom Sutton:

Michael Kaluta on Madame Xanadu:

Gil Kane on the sci-fantasy Star Hawks--which was only in color on Sundays:

Rafael Kayanan has graduated to doing martial arts and broody pictures of Conan, but he and the colorists on Fury of Firestorm back in the '80s took any opportunity to go in a fantasy direction, even though the comic was superhero book:

Walt Simonson's Thor was as much superhero and sci-fi as fantasy and the coloring was never unique, but it did manage to consistently avoid embarrassing itself, the figures always looked like they were the color they were on purpose:

Last and definitely not least, probably the most well-known example in the genre, Barry Windsor-Smith's full-color self-colored version of the Conan story Red Nails from Marvel Treasury:

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