Chairman Pow. The computer colorist thing DocCathode suggested sounds pretty plausible when you consider that computer coloring started getting very competitive in the 1990s along with the ill–fated comic book speculation boom. Remember all those new comics companies, all those start up titles? The one thing that would get your book noticed in that deluge is expert cover coloring – which would drive up the pay for top colorists – which would be hard to scale back even after the boom went bust.
I do wish we could get some corroborating numbers and maybe a source for comic book script writers’ wages.
Todd Klein is a brilliant, diverse, award-winning letterer and is probably the best in the business right now, and one of the most accurate. I also enjoy Jeff Smith’s lettering in BONE, which he designed as a random-letter generated computer font based on his own handwriting. I admire Charles Schulz, who did his own lettering in PEANUTS right up to the very end. Chick Young’s lettering in BLONDIE is very nice, considering how he’s one of a few artists who manages to draw full-figured characters in panels, and PRINCE VALIANT evokes the past nicely.
If you examine them though, Bill Watterson and George Herriman’s lettering could range from competent to damn near-illegible.
Back in the bad old days, before laser scanning, interior coloring was good old fashioned 4 color printing with a limited palette (maybe some of you folks are too young to remember). Given deadlines and such, you didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it, either. You mixed certain set colors - like costume colors (which tended to be stock colors anyway) and just went through and banged out the pages. Talking to some of the old pros, there were books in the old days where the interior colorist was allowed 16 colors and no more than that.
The cover, however, might have been an honest to goodness painting. It might have been done at a larger scale than actually printed, which also added to the time involved, as a way of getting more detail. Much more likely to have custom color work or special printing effects.
When laser-scanning got started back in the 1980’s (which is why I was involved in this) this was even more true - the cover artist got paid more because they were investing more time and effort into their cover than the interior colorist was doing on a half dozen interior pages.
There used to be different rates for a “laser colorist” vs. a 4-color process colorist. Probabably not anymore.
Whether any of that is still true I don’t know - but the historical legacy could account for some of the continuing price difference.