Jerry Serpe, 19XX-2008



Longtime DC Comics colorist Jerry Serpe died on Monday in Floriday, it was announced yesterday to a comics-related mailing list by his daughter and late confirmed by officials at DC. Serpe was a reminder of a forgotten but almost fundamental aspect of comics history -- that the companies producing the material in an editorial sense used to house and continue a house a number of craftsmen who contribute to various aspects of production where technical requirements and artistic sensibility meet.

According to comics historian Mark Evanier and Serpe's DC Profiles in-comics biography, Serpe worked for the coloring and separations company Photochrome that had as a client DC Comics. When that company went under, he and Jack Adler moved to DC to work under another former Photochrome employee, Sol Harrison. Serpe worked in-house coloring the bulk of DC's interiors until the 1970s when he took advantage of a severance package and became a freelance colorist that worked in 1970s and 1980s. If you're at all familiar with DC Comics coloring from that time period and the way the color often suggested a mood more explicitly than offered up a representational depiction of the objects on-panel, you're likely familiar with Serpe's work.

Please go to the included links, particularly for the nice samples of color work at the bottom of the Four Realities blog posting. There's also some cool art with color notes on it here.
 
posted 10:40 am PST | Permalink
 

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