I M A G E A S S O C I AT E
Steve Oliff Steve Oliff is one of the true masters of comic book coloring with a career that spans back to the ’70s and continues to the present day. He’s provided sophisticated hues to such classic stories as The Death of Captain Marvel, X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, and Avengers Forever. With his groundbreaking artistic work for the Marvel translation of Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, Oliff became one of the key pioneers in integrating the digital coloring age into the field. By the arrival of Image Comics, Steve and his innovative Olyoptics Studios made everyone take note of Image’s top notch production, which at the time was second to none. At the height of Image’s boom period, Olyoptics provided color and separations for over 70 percent of the line; eventually WildStorm, Extreme and Top Cow developed their own coloring departments. Steve’s contribution to books like Spawn and The Maxx remain eye-opening in terms of how natural the colors and art came together. Oliff recently returned to comics on Bob Burden and Rick Geary’s Gumby Comics. In the ’80s, what you were doing was kind of revolutionary at the time. No one had quite seen someone use colors in comics like you did. Well, there was nobody doing full color, and that’s what I’ve always done. Since basically my earliest work, it’s all been hand done full-color, until we took over the computer stuff. I did a little bit of the coded color guide stuff where you have it handseparated, but I started off on the four-color Hulk magazine and Bill Sienkiewicz’s first Moon Knight story in 1978, and it just went from there. You hadn’t worked for Todd before Spawn; he was the one who brought you into the Image fold? Yeah, he was. We’d talked about it for a long time. He said that he liked the stuff that I’d been doing earlier. I think this was probably after Akira had started, but I remember we had talked about working on a Hulk graphic novel that he was supposed to do, and then he got the Spider-Man gig. When it went into its own title, he talked to Marvel about trying to see if they’d be interested in having me do the color on that, but it didn’t work out. So when Spawn came along, he sent us a test series of pages. He was basically hedging his bets and he wasn’t sure who he wanted, really, so he had some test guides done and some color separations done. Olyoptics was pretty well cruising on Akira by that time, because I think this was ’92, and we’d started Akira in ’89. Akira was ground-breaking work. Yeah, because that was the first comic book to be colored using a computer. Who took that chance? Was it Archie Goodwin? It was Archie Goodwin. I’d been interested in computers for a long time. I’d been coloring first on photostats and different things, that was in the late ’70s, early ’80s, and then we did the graylines with Eclipse. Then we moved onto some of the blueline projects that I did for DC, like… Well, the first blueline project I did was for First Comics. It was Howard Chaykin’s Time 2, the First graphic novel, which is some of my best coloring ever, actually. And then went on to the Blackhawk mini-series for DC, which led to Cosmic Odyssey, Gilgamesh II and a bunch of other blueline projects.
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Steve Oliff. Courtesy of Steve.
Armature, mascot for the colorist’s Olyoptics company. ©2007 Steve Oliff.