How to read colours in comics

Writers : Olli Löytty & Ralf Kauranen

Those familiar with the qualification requirements in Finnish elementary education and high school have stumbled upon many a different “literacy” – a recent addition to which is “multiliteracy”. The term refers to an understanding of different modalities and the ability to combine different systems of meaning. 

Comics are a most convenient medium for the education of different literacies. They also provide a very fitting tool for studying the combination of words and images.

In addition to this, comics provide us with a forum to study an aspect relevant to both the arts and media more generally: the use of colour. What meanings are related to colours? How is one to analyse the use of colours?

Colour literacy is not mentioned in the curricula of the Finnish educational system and it would surprise us if it was mentioned in the curricula in any other national context. The use of colours is also an undertheorized field in comics studies, as Jan Baetens stated in an article in 2011. This is, perhaps, related to the fact that the interests of comics studies to a large extent hail from literary studies. Colour use isn’t a self-evident ingredient in the critique of comics either, seldom do you see descriptions of what the functions of colours are or what their role is in narration.

What’s done with colours in comics?

As Baetens proposes, there are, due to the medium’s history, certain cultural values attached to the use of colours in comics. Historically, the use of colours has been an economic matter, but aesthetic and ideological factors have, of course, played a role too. The colouring of comics panels has been a process that hasn’t necessarily been seen as part of the creative work in comics.

Colours in comics are significantly a question of both style and genre. Although the black and white in newspaper comics or the colours of comic books have been signs of economic necessity or commercial interests and the attached status of low-brow or mass culture, black and white today may be a stylistic choice pertaining to generic conventions. For example, many contemporary classics in (auto)biographical comics are in black and white: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, just to name two.

Baetens remarks that ‘black-and-white’ and ‘colour’ are not uniform as concepts. For example, black-and-white can create a whole variety of grayscales with the help of halftone dots. Instead of black-and-white, monochromatic can mean ‘brown-and-white.’ In addition, multichromatic has differences of degree. The basic problem in studying colours is, according to Baetens, that it cannot be approached as a separate variable. Colouring is a part of a large variety of styles and techniques with which the reader is interpellated to the story. 

Colours – and different scales of gray in the case of black-and-white – may carry narrative significance in comics. Baetens writes about Tintin in which certain colours help the reader to identify the characters immediately: a light blue jersey stands for Tintin, a dark blue jersey stands for captain Haddock while a green outfit stands for professor Cuthbert Calculus. Colouring also connects different parts and elements in a story to each other. 

The colours of hate and hope

Vihan ja inhon internet (Kosmos 2017) – in English The Internet of Hate and Loathing – written by Johanna Vehkoo and illustrated by Emmi Nieminen is a broad work of comics journalism on online violence directed at women. An excerpt has been translated into English and published on the Drawing the Times website for comics journalism. The work centres on women whose public statements or deeds and presence in the public have caused an outburst of anonymous campaigns and targeted hateful messaging directed at them. Online misogyny is treated as a phenomenon that seriously threatens women’s opportunities to take part in public life. The comic, however, while reporting on a social problem also has an empowering feminist message. It suggests means of how to deal with the problem and it provides an uplifting story of collectivity and coping through visual narration, including the use of colours. (We have submitted an article manuscript for review, on Vihan ja inhon internet as a feminist comic.) 

Vihan ja inhon internet is divided in four main chapters (in addition to a prologue and an epilogue), each with their own set of colour tones. On the one hand, the colours separate the different sections from each other, on the other hand, the use of colours and even sudden occurrences of colour tie together different parts and the phenomena described in them. The main colours in the first part, on the targets of online violence, are blue and orange. The second part on research on the phenomenon is a soberly dullish combination of grey and brown. The part on the haters combines the grey with a bright red signifying the hate. In the final part, on helpers and help available to targets is presented in orange and a greenish turquoise.

The connection between the colour red and hate and violence is hardly surprising to anyone living in Western culture. The colour red dominates the chapter on internet trolls. The trolls themselves as well as concepts describing online violence are underlined with a strong red. That particular bright tone of red does not occur elsewhere in the album, except on one occasion in the first part of the book on the targets of online hate. In the beginning of the book the red colour can be found in the background of a megaphone that is hooting hateful messages. On the one hand, this spot of red colour acts like an introduction to the part dealing with hate. On the other hand, the part of the book on online haters provides more content to the megaphone in the beginning.

The quantity of the colour red in the chapter dealing with online hate and trolls supports the narration of the comic’s feminist ethos. As a character within the storyworld, the writer Johanna Vehkoo chats with a few men who have sent hateful online messages to women. In the beginning the men are portrayed as gigantic monsters whose red colouring covers whole pages. As the conversation proceeds the troll shrinks from a threatening monster to a minor male figure with a red shirt and brown red trousers. While he dwindles away the red patches on the pages decrease and the space occupied by hate wanes, and Vehkoo can leave him behind.

Vihan ja inhon internet ends with a hopeful picture of women who look at their phones in their hands with an ethereal smile or with indifference. While reminding the reader of the cover of the album, its prime colours are orange and a greenish turquoise on a white background. The text in the picture bears witness to the women’s attitude towards problems discussed in the album: “We will not be silenced.” The orange in the picture is familiar to the reader both from the beginning of the album, the part on the targets of hate speech, and from the end, the part on helpers. The appearance of the colour orange in the two sections connects the targets of hateful speech to those who are offering them help and assistance. In the chapter on helpers, also those who have experienced online hate tell about their coping and practices that have proved useful. This approach is effective because it shows that the targets of online hate campaigns are not victims but survivors and consequently members in a larger collective of women that together resists the violence targeted at women. The use of colours in the album strengthens its message of feminist empowerment.

References

Baetens, Jan (2011) From Black & White to Color and Back: What Does It Mean (not) to Use Color? College Literature Vol. 38, No. 3, Visual Literature (Summer 2011), pp. 111–128, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41302875?seq=1.

Nieminen, Emmi & Vehkoo, Johanna (2017) Vihan ja inhon internet. Helsinki: Kosmos.

Nieminen, Emmi & Vehkoo, Johanna (2018) The Internet of Hate and Loathing. Drawing the Times, https://drawingthetimes.com/story/internet-hate-loathing/.