Chris Ware - Jimmy Corrigan - Blab 7 - Production Color Guide

Chris Ware Blab! #7 "Jimmy Corrigan" Production Color Guide Group (Kitchen Sink Press, 1992).

Jimmy buys candy at the pharmacy and later, at home, welcomes a stray cat, sharing a piece of candy with it in Chris Ware's two-page spread that appeared on the Inside front and back cover of the comic.

Includes the blue pencil shading used for printed overlay, printed shading and stat on another overlay layer over production stat with Zipatone attached to Crescent illustration board . Also includes green print overlay over production stat and two more pages of production stats.


From the Denis Kitchen Collection.

Chris Ware's next - broader - publication after Raw was Blab 7 (Winter 1992) published by the legendary Kitchen Sink Press. This pre-dates his Acme Novelty Library 1 (Winter 1993).

Chris Ware made a 2 page Jimmy Corrigan story for the inside front and back cover of the comic.

This is the color guide for that story.

I normally don't collect production stuff but it gives some insight on how Chris Ware did his coloring at that time and I love the little Jimmy Corrigan blue pencil rough.


In Monograph Chris Ware explains the - painstaking - process:
"I'd make Xerox copies, bring them home, and then color them so I'd have some idea of how the strip might appear once printed. Keeping up to a fairly standardized palette of colors which I'd come up with myself so as to prevent surprises, then came the day-long headache-inducing task of preparing the separations themselves on drafting vellum with a "zip-a-tone," self-adhesive film pre-printed with halftone dots in percentages of grey.

The results were nearly always deeply disappointing if not disastrous, sometimes due to stupid errors on my part, sometimes due to photography mistakes in the negative-making process which might fill in a light grey to something muddy and dark.

I spent a lot of money on zip-a-tone as well as on aspirin during these years and loathed every minute of it."


Chris Ware published also a longer Jimmy Corrigan story for that issue.
I have a small piece of that story in my collection: https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-blab-7-128126