Are comics that are coloured (e.g. photoshop) better than others (like pencil-coloured, shaded)?

The short answer is no.

There are some people that are put off by monochrome comics but to be honest they are idiots.

Colour done well can make things more appealing, for exmple modest medusa shifted from B+W to colour fairly quickly but it looked good regardless. Many manga style comics look great with just tones.

Colour can very much add to a comic but it isn't essential, find what works for you and conveys the feel of the story best. If you aren't very good at colouring practice lots.

Yeah, colour comics are on the next level.
The last level is Pinky TA, you need a special pass code to enter. :kitty:


Genejoke has the right of it. It all comes down to doing your art well for the feel you want.

Learning how to use colour well can be extremely hard, BUT, it's the easiest thing to use to create an interesting image that draws in the eye of the viewer. And you can do more with it than anything else.
-It's the most expensive option for printing though-

Monochrome and line art is much easier to get the hang off (because there's less to work with), but it's also much harder to create imagery with it that grabs viewers in just the same way as a colour pic would. It takes more skill!

Pure black and white is something else altogether. It's really good for creating striking art that grabs the viewer, it can be very tricky to manage, and there are a lot of limitations.

All I know is I tend to get somewhat more hits on an update if I used color (something additional to catch the eye, I suppose) as opposed to b/w. But I'm not some amazing line artist so if you can manage tight illustrations in b/w, you're probably fine.

No. Color just makes them more popular.

Personally, I love b/w comics. Somehow, brush strokes speak more to me than colors do. I'm more about the texture than the color. I love Jeff Smith's linework, for example.

I find that most of the time, the last thing you do on an artwork has the power of making it much better, or much worse. If colours are very well done, it will most of the time be a plus. If the coloring is horrible, it will make everything look worse. Both can be as good, depending on how they are treated.

I usually am more forgiving of black and white comic, colouring that I consider bad makes my eyes cringe, but as Abt_Nihil said, colors tend to be popular.

Just some pros and cons(many depends of the ability of the artist):

Colors pros:
- Attention grabber
- Helps differentiate different elements
- Easier to show time atmosphere(morning, night, etc.)
- Good to cover different types of emotionnal ambiances

Colors cons:
- Managing the color schemes
- Can crowd an image too much
- Depending on the level of realism and the medium, they can be extremely time consuming skill demanding
- Often more expensive

Black/White or monochrome pros:
- Can be pretty fast depending on the style
- You only have only one "color" to manage
- Good for dark and serious atmosphere
- Without colours' distraction, emotions can seem more powerful if well done
- Usually cheaper

Black/White cons:
- A bit harder to develop a distinct style
- Less forgiving on consistency or composition errors, everything must be extra clear
- They can seem boring(not enough contrast, action, atmostphere, etc)
- Showing the time of the day can be hard, especilly with solid black and white only comics

To put it simply, some comics just LOOK better with color.

I want my comics to have an animation/animated still look to them, so I color them. If I wanted to do a comic with a noir vibe, I'd want to use a more graphic b & w style.

Personally, I'm more drawn to color comics. I think monochrome comics look nice if it fits the mood, and I think black and white comics look nice if they use graphic line art and/or inking techniques. Black and white comics that are simply black line art on white paper need to have crazy good or at least interesting lines or else it just looks like you forgot to add the color!

If you can update faster and more regularly without color, then it's better to do without color.

If you don't colour your comic (like ours) it's useful to use techniques like screentones to give your work the the depth or interest that Oz mentioned. I don't think it's any easier than learning to colour though, and there's plenty to learn down that path.

Dodger
To put it simply, some comics just LOOK better with color.

Agreed, some comics do look better with color. That said there's some comics I've read that I would have preferred to be black and white like Stumptown and some parts of Battlechasers. Also seeing as how Jeff Smith was brought up, I think the colorized version of Bone looks awful. In all of those color felt like an afterthought and didn't look like it belonged with the rest of the artwork.

sama
If you don't colour your comic (like ours) it's useful to use techniques like screentones to give your work the the depth or interest that Oz mentioned. I don't think it's any easier than learning to colour though, and there's plenty to learn down that path.

Oh yeah, screentones. And spot coloring can look pretty snazzy too.

Thankyou everybody, I'm sort of thinking I will use my colouring at first and when my comic gets scary I will go b&w, maybe I will go back and redo the first pages one day, please can you still keep coming with your tips? :D

What you should do is experiment a little. Try b/w, and try colouring (not necessarily in that order). It's really about what works best for you. Are you prepared to spend quality time colouring your comics, or would you rather use black and white? I started off black and white, but that wasn't really working for me, so I shifted to colour. (However, b/w is good for flashback scenes). But, there's sme good advice in this thread already, so good luck with your decision!!

Both color and 'no color' can be equally great:


Color:

http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Adventures_of_Katmandi

No Color:

http://www.drunkduck.com/Louder_Than_Bombs

Psh. Of course color makes everything better. I work exclusively in high contrast black and white out of humility.

Snarkiness aside- one of these days, I'm gonna release something in color. I'm just too stuck in the "it costs HOW much to print" mentality since most of my early work was done for zines and such. I became used to telling stories where black and white helped. But color can be so pretty ._.

I don't think my comic worked for people till I started colouring it, but I think that has more to do with my poor colours making people just except it as a stupid comic!

Using color can be a great tool for comics but that isn't to say that B&W or screentone are outmoded or ugly ways of doing a comic.
Basically I just follow what Scott McCloud said on his website that with the internet you don't need to use techniques like cross hatching and screentone, those methods are good for printing but with web exclusive content color is cheap and easy so why not do it?

Color may make a comic look better, but it doesn't make the comic any better. More atheistically pleasing perhaps.

Mitaukano
Using color can be a great tool for comics but that isn't to say that B&W or screentone are outmoded or ugly ways of doing a comic.
Basically I just follow what Scott McCloud said on his website that with the internet you don't need to use techniques like cross hatching and screentone, those methods are good for printing but with web exclusive content color is cheap and easy so why not do it?

Because it really does take more time. And in the end, a colored comic with a slow update schedule will have a smaller readership than a B&W comic which updates very regularly.

It depends on your art style and how detailed your colors have to be. Ofc if you draw like in Scott McCloud's book, then yeah just color it, the lines are so simple and thick.

Coloring in grayscale or B&W may take time at first, while you get used to its rules... but then it's so much faster.

Does color make comics better? No. Does it make them bitter? Oh yeah, like the dickens! :)

Yunno, I was actually going to say something thoughtful about how color doesn't matter and it's all about technique and all that other crap, but then it occurred to me that there aren't too many black-and-white comics I can think of on my Favorites List (and I have a very long Favorites List). So, high-minded rationalizations aside, maybe it does matter a little?

I originally intended to make BVZ in Black and White... But the B/W page didn't pop the way I wanted it to. So I colored it and it looked much better. So even though it takes more time... Color works for me.

Honestly, I think it's harder to make a good looking B/W comic sometimes. I have a real issue with varying my line weights, so if I didn't use color to differentiate, some pages would look like a muddled mess.

I can't speak for everyone, but I definitely know that color makes my stuff more appealing to a potential audience. I use loud, vibrant colors that come from prismacolor markers. I think they reflect the tone of my writing pretty well. It really does pull the package together in my particular case.

Traditionally, black and white stuff has often struggled to find an audience. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part one will have an easier time acquiring readers if one uses color in their work.

The main reason most people choose black and white is the cost of printing comics. Of course, since this is the web, none of that stuff is relevant to me anymore. Anytime I do a B&W story it is purely for aesthetic reasons.

Of course, on an artistic level, black and white stuff can be absolutely wonderful. I vividly recall being stunned by the artistry inside a B&W phonebook of Marvel's Tomb of Dracula series from the 1970's. Then, when I saw a color edition, the first thing that came to mind was how the color ruined everything.

Short answer: no.

Long answer: no, it really depends on what kind of story you're doing. Honestly, don't use color if it doesn't help. For example, say you're doing a film noir-like comic, and you're coloring it all these bright, happy colors while the hard-nosed detective is narrating about the crime of the city. Unless you're in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that probably won't fly. You'll want to either mute the colors or not use them at all.

Likewise, if your comic is a happy romp about a rabbit dancing around, colors would probably aid in the storytelling to emphasize the kind of story it is with the bright, happy colors.

Of course, I'm not saying serious stories = no color or silly stories = color. What I am saying is you should look carefully at what you do story-wise and ink-wise. If you are ridiculously good at blackspotting and setting a tone with black and white, color may take away from your inks. Likewise, color may help pop your comic more than what it would normally. Test around and find out. Try different coloring methods, too. Literal colors, monochromatic, mood colors (don't color literally what they are, but rather what the mood is), and so on. Maybe even select colors (think Sin City).

I myself tend to always use color, mostly because people tend to say that's my strongest trait, so it helps the story along. I know several comics where I've seen color on it and seen it without, and think, "Dear God, get rid of those colors," because it took away from the original inks.

Color just makes the comic look prettier :p. Whether a comic is in color or not shouldn't make a difference in how interesting the story is.

I'll use two titles by Robert Kirkman as an example:
Walking dead would lose a lot of its strenght if it was done full color.
Invincible would also lose a lot if it was plainly b/w.

In first example, the lack of colors adds to the bleakness of the world, whereas in teh second one a good colorist manages to preserve the penciller's and inker's work but also adds something of his own.

So yeah, it all depends.

Anyway, it's not that binary.

After all a b/w comic could be simply b/w lineart or something along the lines of sin city. It could also be shaded in greyscale or toned with screentones. Or heavily crosshatched. Or it could be soft pencil art or not as soft (but still very tonal) charcoal.

Similarily, you can color things with flat colors or with gradients. Or you could use textures. Or not. You can also leave the lineart black or color it too. OR perhaps remove it entirely and go for a painterly effect where there are no black contour lines on anything. And you could do that in a very photorealistic fashion or go with a loose, impressionistic (I guess?) blobs of paint.

And then there are spot colors on b/w art, duotone and monochromatic coloring (everything in shades of blue or red).

Or you could do a "sin city" styled page, but instead of black and white use red and yellow! Or you could even slap large dot tone on the background to make it more distinct. Possibilities are limitless!

pencils, charcoal, colored pencils, crayons, copic markers, standard markers, sharpies, rapidographis, crowquill pens, ballpoints, biros, gelpens (colored ones too), watercolours, acrylic paint, gouache, oil... OR paint tool sai, photoshop, corel painter, manga studio etc. whatever the project requires!

Haha, got carried away there!

Aurora Borealis
Anyway, it's not that binary.

Very true.

Aurora Borealis
After all a b/w comic could be simply b/w lineart

Line art doesn't work as well as other methods unless you do something more- have texture, solid blacks, hyper-detail, minimalist simplification...

One of the comics I bought at Comic con is a good example of line-art not working: GREAT drawing done with top-notch skill, lots of detail, everything looking really good etc, but totally empty and hollow.

The problem with it was that it was the sort of "open" line-art that you do when you intend for things to be coloured in. They'd printed it without the colour to save on costs, which was a big mistake for the art. It would have worked WAAAAY better if they'd just converted the colour pages to grey-scale.
By just producing line art versions of stuff that was obviously intended to be coloured/filled in it actually detracts from the work.

Conversely- a lot of professional "American" type comics now mostly use this cheap style of airbrushed Photoshop colouring, which can look horribly cliche, (at least to me), and detract from the work. The lineart is often really good, with nice solid inking and good solid blacks, it just doesn't NEED cheap crappy Photoshop colour that really only looks like an afterthought.

ozoneocean

Aurora Borealis
After all a b/w comic could be simply b/w lineart

Line art doesn't work as well as other methods unless you do something more- have texture, solid blacks, hyper-detail, minimalist simplification...

One of the comics I bought at Comic con is a good example of line-art not working: GREAT drawing done with top-notch skill, lots of detail, everything looking really good etc, but totally empty and hollow.

The problem with it was that it was the sort of "open" line-art that you do when you intend for things to be coloured in. They'd printed it without the colour to save on costs, which was a big mistake for the art. It would have worked WAAAAY better if they'd just converted the colour pages to grey-scale.
By just producing line art versions of stuff that was obviously intended to be coloured/filled in it actually detracts from the work.

Ah, but if it's minimalist simplification... it's still lineart :D

Newspaper strips function fine without color. For example Charles Schultz' Peanuts. But yeah, if something was drawn with the "colorist will fill this up and make it look better" mindset, then obviously the page will be lacking if it's strict b/w.

(also, I could find a bunch of alternative comics that use pure lineart for good effect)

ozoneocean
Conversely- a lot of professional "American" type comics now mostly use this cheap style of airbrushed Photoshop colouring, which can look horribly cliche, (at least to me), and detract from the work. The lineart is often really good, with nice solid inking and good solid blacks, it just doesn't NEED cheap crappy Photoshop colour that really only looks like an afterthought.

Can't disagree with that one.

Aurora Borealis
Ah, but if it's minimalist simplification... it's still lineart :D

Newspaper strips function fine without color. For example Charles Schultz' Peanuts.

You may have misunderstood me here-
I'm saying that simple ineart works great if done right.
With Peanuts or Wizard of ID or something like that you have lines and solid backs.
And lineart that is done deliberately with minimalist simplification can look cool- better than something that's just made up of outlines.


---------------------------

Anyway, texture is my thing now. I've been getting away from the too smooth, nicey, nicey, pure gradient, airbrushy, soft colour style that computer colouring tends to lend itself to and embracing a harder edged style.
I still use soft edged brushes and gradient effects for specific intances that require them, but I'm changing my overall style to look grittier. It's rather fun!

-I take my primal inspiration from Frank Frazetta there: He was a good dirty painter. And I take my warning from Boris Vallejo: cringe-worthy images with far too much soft, airbrush, glistening effects...

ozoneocean
You may have misunderstood me here-
I'm saying that simple ineart works great if done right.
With Peanuts or Wizard of ID or something like that you have lines and solid backs.
And lineart that is done deliberately with minimalist simplification can look cool- better than something that's just made up of outlines.

Peanuts have blacks on appropriate stuff. Black hair, black pattern on a shirt etc. So should any proper lineart (assuming there are meant to be any black spots/black hair). Anyway, anything done right looks right and done wrong looks wrong (although it could still look right if you accidentally stumble upon something amazing, but that's another thing).

ozoneocean
Anyway, texture is my thing now. I've been getting away from the too smooth, nicey, nicey, pure gradient, airbrushy, soft colour style that computer colouring tends to lend itself to and embracing a harder edged style.
I still use soft edged brushes and gradient effects for specific intances that require them, but I'm changing my overall style to look grittier. It's rather fun!

-I take my primal inspiration from Frank Frazetta there: He was a good dirty painter. And I take my warning from Boris Vallejo: cringe-worthy images with far too much soft, airbrush, glistening effects...

Vallejo had a couple of good paintings in the past, mostly in the 70s and early 80s I think (might be off on that) but yeah, his later supershiny stuff is rather atrocious.
The artist who did amazing "smooth and shiny" art was Luis Royo, and even he has switched towards dirtier, sketchier art as the years went by.

Interestingly, I seem to be more and more drawn towards flat coloring. Maybe flat with somewhat "jaggy" edges on shadows, but mainly flat.

Yeah, I find I'm drawn to flat colors as well. I developed a fascination with screen prints, with heavy black lines accented by one or two additional colors. I just think it looks cool.

It adds depth, and makes it vibrant, but anyone with a bit of intuition and an idea can make a black and white comic stand out. An artist willing to make the most of his tools and utensils can pull something as unique as the 'Magic Window' VHS logos I'd see before my Real Ghostbusters tapes back in the day.