Vertigo Quarterly CMYK #1

Anyone who has installed an ink cartridge in his or her printer has likely encountered four familiar colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. No, you didn’t accidentally buy a cut-rate cartridge; these are the four colors that comprise the four-color printing process, the dominant means through which comic books were produced from the 1940s through the 1970s. Comic book publishers sought to lend a level of depth to their books that black and white alone could not offer. Unfortunately, four-color printing wasn’t the panacea they thought it would be; what it was though was an iconic style unto itself.
Pick up an older comic book and take a look at the heavily saturated colors, the dot-matrix style of printing, the way the colors bleed into one another. It creates a unique visual aesthetic that instantly evokes the feeling that only comes with thumbing through a comic book. From paper to ink, comic book quality has improved tenfold over the years, but now Vertigo is paying homage to the medium’s past with a brand new series we’re proud to exclusively announce. Meet Vertigo Quarterly: CMYK, an anthology series inspired by the printing process that helped define the medium as we know it, written and illustrated by some of the top creators working today.