[rant]When I was a kid (around seven or eight years old) and really getting into comic books and trying to figure out how they were made, there were no books on comic books. There was a big book in our school library that was full of activities and had several pages on cartooning, but that didn't explain the process for how comic books were made.
In my kid mind, trying to figure out what the black lines and the little coloured dots were all about, I had the theory that the black lines kept the colours in. When they printed the comic book, they needed to have those black lines or else the coloured dots would all spill out. So black lines were very important. I was amazed whenever there were pictures where the black lines weren't keeping the colours in--for example in DENNIS THE MENACE by Hank Ketcham, he had gaps in the ink lines where the colours should have spilled out (look at Ketcham's necks for example)--his inking style was what I would compare later with Dick Giordano.
Even after I was able to learn more about how comic books were made (thanks to THE AMAZING WORLD OF SUPERMAN [Metropolis Edition] (1973)), I still felt that those black lines were important and a fundamental element in what made comic art comic art.
That's a long explanation for why I can't stand a lot of the current comics. Even when I find a comic book that interests me and has good writing, I'm disturbed by the fact that some colouring artist with an electronic device has gone in and converted all the black lines to other colours. On top of which this person has filled in the spaces with colour shading that's supposed to make it look like the pages were painted--even though they clearly weren't painted, it's just a computer program.
I can't help but look at the pages and try to picture what the actual pencilled page (if there was one) and the actual inked page (if there was one) had looked like before this person ruined the whole thing with all that colour that adds nothing to telling the story. It's like they don't want the page to look like it's a comic book page--or to use all the conventions that were established over generations for the visual language of comic books.
Black india ink was the life-blood of comics. When I bought TARZAN by Joe Kubert, if there was a scene of blood pouring from a wound, Joe would use solid black ink to represent the blood. That blew me away--it meant so much more that the blood was black. If Joe had merely outlined the blood and the colour separator filled it in with red (magenta + yellow in the printing), it wouldn't be as visceral. There was something about the stark blackness that meant more. Today, some colouring artist would go in and convert the black to red, as if that somehow made the art any better.
Today's comic books just aggravate me so much with these ridiculous decisions that interfere with the dynamic immediacy of comic book story telling, so it becomes psychological torment and not entertainment.[/rant]