Wendy Broome:Colorist

I have always tried to rock the boat in terms of color. From those days when Brian Haberlin, Alex Sinclair, and I were trying to figure out how to use Photoshop for comicbooks, to when I let us say bewildered the world with the not so well recieved color job on issue #1 of Stormwatch.

Color is in my blood. I love the way it shapes things I draw. In fact right now I am for the first time oil painting and having a blast....

But anyways, here we are with Wetworks #1 again and I couldn't pass the challenge to try colors again. This time I had an accomplice...Wendy Broome. She has been coloring for Wildstorm FX since the old school daze and just recently this year went freelance because she gave birth to hers and Matt's first child. So I liked what she had been doing prior to going freelance and asked if she would not like to color Wetworks for me.

Thruout a couple of months we had worked out a formula that you don't really get to see kick in til issue #2 of Wetworks. The formula goes something like this...

Since I was going back to my old penciling style with alot of blacks and cross-hatching I decided to change it up abit, the pencils that is, in terms of the highlight areas of the drawings. That meant that I would consciously be trying to open up the highlight areas of the drawing leaving as much open space with no lines in the highlight areas. So that leaves alot of detail in the darker portions of the drawings and an open area within the highlights. This would leave Wendy room to add in color an extra highlight that's sole purpose was to accenuate the forms/shapes in the highlight areas I didn't draw. She would in fact be drawing in color, albeit only in the highlight areas. And conversely since most of the drawing is in the darker portions there is very little if any color work or variations there.

I thought and still do that this is a better compromise to the "traditional" color method of trying to recolor in color detail every portion of the drawing. I remember in the old daze we use to get a kick out of turning off the black plate and seeing how well we could shade the drawings without any of the black ink lines. Back then it was fun for awhile but especially when you got complicated inks to color it becomes redundant work and sometimes overpowering.

So Wendy finally gets the hang of it in the first half of issue #2. As she e-mails me the pages I go crazy over its simplicity and impact. When something looks good and looks like its simple that's a good sign that it works....well...

Then Wildstorm FX goes thru another bout of needing to bring back work into the studio and top of that list is Wetworks. So Wendy is yanked off the book by issue three. Thereafter the book gets colored in house in the studio by Wildstorm FX. I'm sure the "pit" (as Wildstorm FX is affectionately called internally) will do a fantastic job I know them all personally but still, especially for Wendy and the time we spent developng this style...I will miss Wendy's input, and will be forever sorry for her not getting the chance to dazzle me with more issue of Wetworks...