Mindy is the only colorist they have right? Unless they’re outsourcing to some cheap autofill color warehouse. So lets chalk one up to Ruby passive-aggressively damning with faint praise.
Going to give a little credit where it’s due here. Colorists have traditionally been one of the lowest things on the comic totem pole, below writers and pencilers, and either equal or slightly below inkers. The only thing lower are the poor letterers. Also there are a slightly higher percentage of female colorists than there are writers or pencilers. I remember talking to a female Transformers comic colorist at a con several years ago, and she was very self deprecating. Compare that with the rockstar reaction some of the line artists got.
Which is a shame because colorists now have way more of an impact on the comic’s aesthetic than the old days of flat four color printing. Computer printing on glossy pages allows every panel to be it’s own mini painting, sometimes quite literally (Alex Ross! Mah Maaahn!)Most line artists these days realize how collaborative the work is, and will praise their colorists to the heavens. Male or female, they’re now getting their due.
But to counter the ‘accuracy’, some criticism from our own Epicus Doomus yesterday. I wanted to quote it, because I’d been thinking the same thing and he said it much better than I could.
It needs to be pointed out here that Mindy got into the comic book business because she was visiting her boyfriend at work, thus any attempts to portray her as some sort of flag-bearing trailblazer will be, uh, quite disingenuous, at best. Also bear in mind that her prior job involved helping her brother (I think) run a broken down old movie house. Perhaps if he wasn’t so lazy BatYak could have written Mindy as a young woman eager to blaze that trail through the (sigh) comic book business, but he chose otherwise. Like many of his female characters, she pretty much stumbled into it while catering to a man. For reference see: Holly, Becky, Jessica, Cindy.
