And it’d have to be black-and-white. Black-and-white is part of the grammar of large rambling graphic novels, in my head – FROM HELL, CEREBUS, THE LAST KINGDOM, add your own here. Also, it’s the grammar of literary graphic novels — MAUS, PERSEPOLIS, etc etc. So I could fool myself, as all pulp writers who finally give up on plot and just drop their bowels in public do, that I am being all literary and clever. Black-and-white always had the mad things in. Now that I reflect on it, I think most of my fondest memories of comics come from b/w books: 2000AD, WARRIOR, LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, ESCAPE, the undergrounds, the independents, the early Anglophone graphic novels…
From the most recent installment of Warren Ellis’ email newsletter. There really is something about black and white comics, isn’t there? For me, it’s stuff like 2000AD, early Deadline, Alec… It’s all very deeply embedded in some way. For all the memories and nostalgia I have surrounding early American comics and their exoticness, it was the British comics that were mostly black and white – or black, white and a third color, normally red or blue – that were big, important jumps forward in my comic reading.