It was a fluke that Noelle Giddings happened to wander into Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in 2021 and their main exhibit was Marvel: Universe of Superheroes, a celebration of the genre Giddings has devoted most of her career to. She was even more surprised to find examples of her work on display in the show, which looked at how comics’ most iconic characters—most of whom Giddings has painted professionally—have evolved over the past 80 years. 

Aquaman 63.3, acrylic ink pencil on wood, 48 x 36"

 

It sparked a sense of nostalgia that, once home on the East End of Long Island, drove her to the boxes that contained her comic art from the early days. A graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York City, Giddings started working in the industry in the mid-1980s, eventually settling into the craft as a colorist. Back then, a pencilist would sketch the script, an inker would clean it up into bold strokes, and then Giddings would hand-paint the black-and-white drawing with Dr. Ph. Martin’s concentrated watercolors, while creating a color guide around the border of the page. A color separator would use the codes when creating the color separations that were used in the printing process back then. Essentially, the codes broke down the pigment percentages so that the printed product would be as close to Gidding’s hand-painted original as possible.

Spider-Man 2099 4.7, acrylic ink on canvas, 48 x 36"

 

“It was this whole language between the colorist, the story, the separator and the printer,” says Giddings. Looking through her painted guides and the codes penciled around the edges, almost like a dead language now, inspired her to recreate a series of them—notations and all—as large-scale paintings. A selection of her new work will be on display in The Lost Art of Hand-Painted Comics, opening July 1 at RJD Gallery.

“If you were flipping through a comic book [from that era], you never got to see all the individual parts and steps—all the creative bits—of the process,” says Giddings. In the mid-90s, computers changed everything. “We no longer needed the separator codes; eventually it didn’t even need to be painted on the page…it could all be done in a computer. Soon it wasn’t a physical art anymore. It was something that was there and then it wasn’t anymore. It was a lost art.”

Scooby Doo 12.9, acrylic ink pencil on wood, 48 x 36"

 

Speed Force Jay Garrick 1, acrylic ink pencil on wood, 30 x 24"

 

Giddings is working on the eighth painting in the series, selecting pages, or “guides” as they were called, that can stand alone without greater context and have strong visual and narrative elements. She was never a comic book nerd and fell into the work through some comic book artists she knew. She remembers the first gig Marvel offered her which she promptly declined—drawing Barbie. “There weren’t many women working in comics back then and they probably thought I would be good at designing the outfits,” she says. Her career took off anyway—name a superhero and she’s drawn or painted it for the biggest companies in the industry. She was recently asked by publisher and distributor DC Comics to paint a story in celebration of Milestone Media’s 30th anniversary, a comics company for which Giddings was the color editor and a “helping founder.” In an ode to the way it used to be done, the pages were painted by hand. 

JSA 'Giant' #1.2: Frightened Man, acrylic ink pencil on wood, 30 x 24"

 

It was actually her comic book experience that landed Giddings in another niche freelance market—creating set-specific artwork for TV and film that attests to her unique ability to paint with the aesthetic sensibility of any period, movement or school—from the Old Masters to contemporary art. 

Still, it is comics that she chooses. 

“Sometimes I’ll do a little still life in oil,” she says. “But really, if I ask myself 'if I had to single out a style of painting what would I choose to paint?’ I’d say ‘I want to paint my paintings!’ It’s like I didn’t want them to be forgotten—and I’m really enjoying them.” —

RJD Gallery
227 N. Main Street • Romeo, MI 48065 • (586) 281-3613 • www.rjdgallery.com

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