Phil Normand on the Ben Day Men

Before comics and Sunday newspaper strips were colored using computers, there were a variety of other methods, some using photography, some not. I’ve talked about the process used at DC Comics when I started there in the late 1970s HERE and HERE, but the very first was the Ben Day method, invented before 1900. It was a difficult and time-consuming enterprise that took years to learn, and was probably only done well by a few elite craftsmen like Jack Adler, before his DC days. On his blog, Phil Normand has written a superb ESSAY ON THE BEN DAY PROCESS, which I recommend highly!