Tom Smith Tom Smith’s hand is a blur as it whisks a stylus from one side of a pad to the other. Up, down, right, down, left, right, down, right — this is his brush and canvas.
On a computer screen in front of him, a black and white image of Leonardo, the humble leader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, comes to life.
Smith is using an airbrush tool in Photoshop to apply the green textures above Leonardo’s mouth. He switches to a highlighting tool to add K-28 — a gray tone in coloring parlance — along the barrel of the gun at the bottom of the panel.
Smith has been one of the comic book industry’s most prolific and successful colorists for some 20 years, collaborating with most of the greatest creators — Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko, Gene Colan, Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson, Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee and Frank Miller, to name a few — in the history of the medium.
But even Smith, an Old Bridge resident who has applied his signature pallet of bright colors to hundreds of books starring every major character in comicdom for DC, Marvel, IDW, Archie and virtually every top publisher, does it with relatively little fanfare.
In the assembly-line process of making a comic book, writers and pencilers are assigned rock-star status by fanboys.
Inkers, the artists who go over the pencil sketches with heavier lines that will stand out when the colors are applied, and letterers, who add the word balloons and sound effects, are respected session players.
But what about colorists such as Smith, who add the royal blue to Superman’s suit, the golden hue of Iron Man’s helmet or the green glow to the Hulk’s irradiated skin? What about the men and women who bring attitude, mood and atmosphere to the pages?
“We’re like the drummers in the band,” said Smith, 55. “The drummer is there to support the main guys; he’s not the star. But if he’s off, it throws the whole project off. Without a good drummer, it doesn’t shine. The same thing with the colorist.
“The color is part of the art. The color sets the mood for the art. … It’s so important that colorists should get more respect because that’s what sells the comic book. People today still don’t know there are colorists. They think one guy does all the artwork.” “Colorists like Tom deserve more respect,” said Neil Vokes, a veteran comic book artist and longtime friend of Smith. “They are like the drummers and bass players. They don’t get all the girls, but without them, you wouldn’t be able to make music. You wouldn’t have anything.”
It’s not only often thankless, but it’s a solitary endeavor. Here in his home studio, wife Rita and daughters Tiffany, 30, Christina, 28, and Deanna, 19, know to leave him to his work.
So, Smith has no company, unless you count his vast collection of Universal Monster statues, Doc Savage pulp novels and superhero action figures. The sign near the door calls this his Fortress of Solitude — a nod to Superman’s serene getaway — but the room is so thick with everything from a Spider-Man windup toy to a life-sized bust of Frankenstein that it’s like a comic con exploded in this room.
Scully and Mulder, Batman and Robin, and Kirk and Spock stand vigilantly among hundreds of action figures on some shelves. Across the room, an X-Man comic with a glow-in-the-dark cover hangs in its plastic wrapping. There is a pinball machine back here, Creature of the Black Lagoon lights strung across the ceiling, and the back room is stocked with boxes of comic books.
Smith spends so much time here — coloring just one comic page could take anywhere from one hour to several days, depending on the detail in the drawing — that he wants to surround himself with his favorite possessions.
His magnum opus, the 2003 “JLA/Avengers” series, brought together the mightiest heroes from the Marvel universe and the greatest heroes of DC comics. It was the highlight of Smith’s 15-year collaboration with superstar artist George Perez, who is known for his detailed work.
Glenn Whitmore, who enjoyed a long run as the colorist on many of the Superman titles, admired Smith’s work on the project because “when you are dealing with many characters in a scene, you could end up with a lot of colors on the page that distract the reader’s eye from the main focal point in the panel. He knows how to direct the reader’s eye and give the composition focus without overwhelming the eye with too many colors.”
Smith said it is a challenge working with Perez because “he doesn’t think about the consequences of putting red characters over red characters. When you have the Wasp and Ant Man standing in front of Iron Man’s chest — they’re all red. As a colorist, you have to make Ant Man stand out. You have to throw highlights on him and lighting effects or else he’d disappear.
“So many times I’d call George and say, ‘Stop putting them in front of each other. Put them off to the side.’ And George would say, ‘I didn’t think about that.’ ”
Getting the chance to collaborate with Perez in 1993 changed his life. Smith was struggling to break into the highly competitive comics field and was spray-painting computer desks on the midnight shift to makes ends meet. But he got a call from an editor asking him to be the colorist on a Hulk story that Perez was drawing called “Future Imperfect.” The editor needed 48 pages colored in 30 days.
“I told my wife, ‘This is it,’ ” Smith remembers. “She was expecting our youngest daughter within a month. I said, ‘This is my break. If I don’t do this, I’ll never get the opportunity again.’ ”
Twenty years and hundreds of comics later, Smith continues to bring the tales of caped supermen to life.
“In this age of murky coloring that often obscures the artwork, Tom’s coloring is like a breath of fresh air,” said longtime Marvel editor Ralph Macchio. “His palette is bright and that’s a good thing. I see that look as his signature. Tom’s ability to really keep the colors bright allows the real power of a Marvel superhero comic to come through loud and clear.”
For more about Smith’s work, log on to http://www.theartistschoice.com/tsmith.htm