I See a Film Noire and I Want it Painted Black

Looking back through Crime Suspenstories in search of relevant material for my final paper, I’ve started to notice something about the color palette of these comics which I consider to be quite intriguing. Throughout a majority of the issues in this first volume, the overriding color used in depictions seems to be black. Whether it be in the backgrounds of panels, in shadows on walls, or in the faces and forms of characters, deep, inky blackness overwhelms Crime Suspenstories. I’m interested in how this palette choice evokes the feel of the “Film Noire.”



For me, the pinnacle of Film Noire can be found in Carol Reed’s The Third Man; in regarding these comics from an art historical lens, I tried to conceptualize their aesthetic feel with this film in mind. Having taken Scott MacDonald’s Intro to History and Theory of Film and watched The Third Man, one of the most important things I took away from the screening was how essential lighting is to the director’s arsenal in the making of the “feel” of a film. In Reed’s classic, the disorienting shadows and rubble of post-war, Allied-occupied Vienna become in themselves one of the characters in the film, paralleled in their somber precariousness with the amorality of Orson Wells’ Harry Lime.

Crime Suspenstories parallels black shading and dark crosshatching with the comic’s thrilling subject matter, achieving a similar effect. Take for instance “High Tide,” the fourth suspenstory in this volume. Even at high noon, characters are bathed in black ink, framing the events to come with an ominous quality. In the cover page’s bottom right panel, the skipper’s [read: murderer’s] face displays this –he stares ahead over the steering wheel with what seems like only 40% of his face naturally colored-in. His shirt, which we immediately take to be white or light blue, is in reality mostly black. Like in The Third Man, there is little gradation throughout these panels, just varying degrees of closely-knit crosshatching or solid blocks of shade. In this way, we’re drawn into an atmosphere representative of the Film Noir genre, where the terror and confusion characters in this story experience is foreshadowed and aided in kind by the coloring of the world in which they exist.