G.I. Joe #26 George Roussos original color guide art

Everybody knows Larry Hama has written about 250 G.I. Joe comics. And almost everybody talks about that famous issue that Hama drew. Well, did rough pencils on. And most of those people recall the other issue Hama roughed — issue #26, “Snake-Eyes: The Origin! Part One.” (And people forget he also-also drew portions of #35 and #36 — so many issues behind schedule!) But a member of the creative team who rarely gets mentioned is George Roussos, who besides coloring a few dozen issues of G.I. Joe, had a long career in comics. He inked part of Two-Face’s first appearance in 1942. As George Bell he’d inked Jack Kirby in the ’60s, and between the two he’d drawn much more. But by the time G.I. Joe rolled around Roussos was a staff colorist for Marvel, and for a bit he colored all of Marvel’s covers. It is Roussos’ colors that we see here on this original color guide to G.I. Joe issue #26 page 14.

Comic art is drawn in black ink on large, white bristol. Photocopies, often shrunk to common 8.5″ x 11″ paper, were handed to the color artists, who applied Dr. Ph. Martin’s dyes, which are concentrated watercolor. The color artist then coded each color, using the limited four-color palette of the day — combinations of just a few percentages of cyan, yellow, magenta, and blank ink. This is how it was all done until the 1990s, when Photoshop, computer separations, and digital pre-press became the norm.

Other folks then would painstakingly cut rubylith masking film to match the placement of the four printing colors, and turn those into plates for the printer. So what you’re looking at above is George Roussos’ original color guide to G.I. Joe issue #26, page 14. It’s not the original comic art — that is left untouched — but it is the original color art.

Oh, here’s something fun. For some reason this color guide was done in two parts, the top half of one sheet of paper, and the bottom half of another, then cut out and taped to the first, revealing some uncolored art. Not easy to find black and white Hama/Leialoha G.I. Joe art!

When I asked Hama if he had any recollections of George Roussos, he replied “George was a character. He was a staff colorist, but everyone suspected that a lot of the freelance stuff he took home with him was actually colored by his wife, who was always referred to as ‘Mrs. George.'” We have no way of knowing who colored this page, and I don’t include Hama’s quote to swipe at Mr. Roussos, who passed away in 2000, but rather as a fun anecdote. Artists and color artists have long had assistants who filled in large areas of black ink, finished backgrounds or crowd scenes, or more recently, flatted colors before a rendering stage. If one could steadily hold a brush, one could fill in color where one’s boss (or husband?) had designated. (Duck fans: Carl Barks’ wife Gare lettered and inked backgrounds for Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories.) And in the limited language of 20th century comics coloring, there’s some interesting stuff going on here in G.I. Joe #26 — the blues-and-purples only of the flashback in the final panel. So I do credit this page to George Roussos, and appreciate his color work at the House of Ideas.

Additionally, Larry Hama added “He came into my office once and told me he had a ten year run of Prince Valiant Sunday pages [clipped] from the Newark Star Ledger, which printed them on gravure at the biggest possible size. He offered me the whole stack for 200 bucks, so I got them. I had them sitting around in my closet for another ten years, and finally sold them to Adam Kubert for what I paid for them.”