Sunday Mailbag- Rubylith?

Q: I buy a lot of original MAD art, and a good bit of it comes with a red cellophane overlay (is it rubylith?) Was that an alternate way to do shading? Or did it replace the duo shade method. It seems to be hand cut to the areas it is shading, and seems tedious. Did the artist have to do it? 

A: This question was asked in a comment on a post a did a few months ago about the duo-shading process I duplicated the look of in the Tarantino retro-parodies MAD did. I thought it would make for an interesting mailbag topic. Be prepared for a lot of ancient shop talk if you proceed.

First, some background:

Being printed entirely in black and white, the interior pages of the pre-2001 MAD Magazine (not counting the really early color comic book stuff) only had one “plate” in the printing process… black. That was of course normal for a black and white publication, but MAD handled the transferring of the original art to print plates a little differently than most comics of the day. Most color comics would have the line art originals drawn without any shading or color at all, just clean lines. Then they would photostat the line art as solid black and white, meaning no dot patterns (aka “half-toning”), but just crisp lines. Then any color was done on a separate board and color separated into the four color plates, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Then the solid line art film of the original art was “stripped in” to the color-separated black film, to create a black plate that combined the dot patterns of the color part with the clean, crisp lines of the original line art. This created a nice, dark, sharp line with the color on the printed page. If a comic was to be in black and white, then any values needed to be created using some method that did not involve continuous tone… meaning you needed to add grays using dots or lines so the art could be photostated as straight black and white, no halftone screens used. This was to preserve the darkness and sharpness of the linework. If you wanted to use washes, you’d need to use separate boards for the line art and the grays to preserve the sharpness of linework.

MAD didn’t bother with all that. They had their artists create an entirely “camera-ready” page using anything they wanted to create the gray values… washes, duo-craft board, “Zip-a-Tone”… whatever. Then, if the artist had any washes or continuous tone in the art, they would simply shoot the entire thing as a halftone meaning the lines, any shading or tonal effects, and even the words in the word boxes got photostated as a halftone all at once. That meant the photostat camera that “shot” the original art to create a film for the printer plate used a dot pattern screen to create a film of the art made up of dots, not solid lines. Yes, even the words got halftoned. The artists were given the typeset copy and glued it with rubber cement right on the original art, and the typeset words were shot along with the rest of the art. That’s why the words in the balloons in old copies of MAD look a little fuzzy… they were also half-toned. This allowed the camera to capture shades of gray as well as the inked lines in the original art. The lines were less crisp using this method, but they still looked great (especially on the crappy paper MAD was printed on) and allowed the artists to use many tonal effects right in the final art.

The MAD artists of the day, like Mort Druker, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Etc. all came from old school comics backgrounds, and each had their preferred methods for adding tonal values to their art. MAD shooting the pages as halftones allowed them to mix these methods up. Some still used the duo-shade paper, and the occasional “Zip-a-tone” pattern. Many did gray washes using ink or sometimes markers. Rubylith was another method of adding grays. Mort used it a lot starting in the 70’s I believe.

Rubylith was a sheet of clear acetate that had a translucent red film layer on top of it (there was also an orange version called “Amberlith”). They would put this over the top of a panel and then use a blade to cut around areas they wanted to have a gray tone to, leaving the red film to overlay the areas meant to be gray. Then they would write the % of gray they wanted the printer to print it at. So there might be a “25% gray” written into the margin. The printer would “strip in” a 25% halftone dot pattern in that area, and the final printed result would have that value in place. One of the nice effects of this method is you could add a solid value with no washy look to it.

Here’s the original art from a few panels from Mort’s parody of “NYPD Blue” in MAD #329:

Here you see Mort has used some kind of markers to add some washy gray values to a few areas. However he wanted to also have some more solid grays in there, so he used rubylith to specify where and how dark:

You can see the tape where he secured the rublylith “flaps” with the cut out areas that were not going to have the gray tone. The “20% GRAY” you see on the left margin was written in by Mort to indicate to the printer that is the percentage of gray wanted in the rubylith areas. The printer removes the rubylith flaps and shoots the original inks without them. The printer then creates a 20% screen using just the rubylith pieces and then repositions them with the half-tones inked art in the final film. The result in print:

This method creates some sharp value contrast. The marker grays were already half-toned from the original art, so they end up overlapping and creating some darker than 20% values that add some textural, washy interest to the art.

By the way, I’m not a printer so some of the technical stuff here might be a bit off. This is the way I understood it works both from talking with printers and from my college days of keylining and photostat classes.

Thanks to Anthony Barkdoll for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!