AW: AW: Stats

[Cord Wiljes]

TIMO: Wow! Thank you for the great intro into the magic of comic book
coloring in the days of yore.

If I understand the process correctly:

There were four different cels for each comic book page: one for cyan,
one for magenta, one for yellow and one for black. Probably all four
looked black and white and the dot screens used to determine the colored
areas also consisted of black dots of varying size and distance. 

Do you know how many different types of dot cels there were?  
With only one type (and three colors) one would get a total of 2^3=8
different colors in print. 
With two different one would be able to print 3^3=27
With four different dot screens you could print 5^3=216 different
colors. Which seems pretty much the number of colors available back
then.

So to color a comic book you needed a photostat of the inked (but
uncolored) artwork, a knife and four types of dot screens. The main task
probably was to prevent the dots on the three color cels from
overlapping (or at least from overlapping completely). Maybe the dots on
the screens were not spaced regularly but at individually randomly
varying distances?

Since the end result could not be seen before the issue was printed the
results were probably not always as expected.

Cord