1984: I Am Coyote

I Am Coyote (1984) by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers et al.

OK, this’ll be a short one. I should just have appended this to the Eclipse Magazine blog post, where this originally ran and I, er, discussed the feature itself.

So there’s not much more to say here than to talk about what’s new: The slightly shiny paper and the colouring by Joe D’Esposito. The colour separation is done in the way that was popular back then which results in blobs of colour put onto the white areas extending vaguely and haphazardly into the black areas. It’s not a very attractive look.

Rogers goes absolutely crazy with the tones on some of the pages, and I wondered how they’d deal with all that chaos when colouring, and… they… kinda failed.

There are some nicely done pages here, though. In general, adapting a black-and-white work to colour often doesn’t work very well, because the artist uses textures and spot blacks to compose the panels. Which doesn’t leave the colourist with many options in many cases.

It’s OK, but I’d recommend the original version.