Was Batman’s costume ever really suppose to be blue?

[mathew101281]

Or did coloring limitations of the time force them to use blue to mimic black?

[Jim Kelly]

It's less that and more to save time and money. Nowadays, you make a little squiggle to indicate this section will be filled with black on the computer and you're done. When everything was done on paper, the inker had to take his brush, dip it in his pot of India Ink, fill in that whole area.

Look at early Blackhawk--the uniforms were very black.

Time goes by and the inker spends less time putting all that black ink on the paper. The highlights (coloured blue or "grey" or left white) become greater--less work for the inker. That's part of it.

Art isn't real. So colours are figurative--they don't represent how things actually look--but we decode them. So if you read comics in the old days, you understood that blue sometimes represented black, purple was grey, orange was brown, a deep orange was red, yellow was gold. After awhile, you just saw them as that way. I think when I looked at Karate Kid, I understood him to be wearing all brown--I didn't see it as orange.

Also if you colour everything black, then you can't see anything. It's a lot easier to spot the blacks--placing them where they will do the most good, to provide contrast. Heck in a lot of movies and T.V. shows, everything is supposed to be happening at night or in a dark cave, yet you can see everything.

It might be possible to create an image that conveys a more realistic kind of darkness, but that's labour intensive. Comics were cheap and low priced--they made money by cutting corners.

ALL that being said, Batman's costume sometimes was meant to look blue. I think by the 1960s, using blue for black was lost on people and Batman's outfit just looked blue in places. But in the 1970s, when Neal Adams and Dick Giordano started using more black on the cape and cowl, then it again looked like it was really supposed to be black with highlights.