Unbagging DC Comics Style Guide

DC Comics Style Guide
Published by Standards Manual, 2024

“I’m pleasantly surprised by all the attention in the media,” he said. “After all, it’s old history, done 42 years ago. But I’m happy to see it’s going to be available to many people, not only a few fans.”

I recently received, from myself, the best Christmas present I’ve gotten in a while. Of course, given that I originally expected to get it in August, it wasn’t intended to be a Christmas present, but given that I never expected to get it at all, I certainly can’t complain too much about the delay, and ultimately the timing worked out.

I am, of course, talking about the DC Comics Style Guide, which I recently showed off in a Mail Call post.

Ever since I got it I find myself periodically opening it up to admire a random page, but even more frequently I just lightly brush my fingers across the surface of it, reverently, as if to reassure myself that it’s real.

As I noted in my Mail Call post, I don’t remember when I first became aware of the existence of the Style Guide, but I do know that as soon as I did I wanted a copy of it, whether that was in the form of an actual, official copy, or in a commercially printed reproduction.

Given the kind of prices they command when sold by those fortunate to have one to sell, the former seemed impossible, and given that DC didn’t seem to have any interest in producing the latter, the odds were against my dream ever being solid enough for me to fondle.

In any case, the point of this Unbagging isn’t to rehash all that, or even just to share more pictures of the glorious art within – though I will be doing that, of course – but instead to share a bit more detail about the original and its history and the reproduction that I now own.

Much of the history of the original is covered inside of the reproduction, with an introduction by comics veteran and former DC Comics President and Publisher Paul Levitz who was there when it happened.

We wanted to change the then-current practice of frequently giving licensees art from the comics to use as if it was clip art, with no additional compensation to the artists involved. And we wanted to establish a more consistent brand look across DC’s many licensees, ideally with a creative feel that was up to the minute.

With this idea, people were pulled together to produce what eventually became the first Style Guide, with Argentinian artist – and goddamn national treasure – José Luis García-López selected as the artist whose clean, modern style would bring the heroes of DC Comics to life on the looseleaf pages of the Guide.

An interview with José Luis García-López and Mary Yedlin, who worked with DC’s licensees, by Dan Greenfield of 13th Dimension, fills in some of the details of how the Guide ultimately came together.

But what was the Guide for, exactly, and how was it used? The intent, as noted by the quote from Levitz, was to provide art and guidance to anyone making products featuring DCs characters, providing background information on who the characters are, guidance on color choices and how to use character logos, ensuring that no character was ever off-model and that there would be a particular look to the characters featured on merchandise.

One of the character pages that divided up the art.

If you’ve ever seen a product – birthday cards, T-shirts, etc. – featuring the likeness of a DC character, the odds are good that the images featured were direct reproductions of images featured in the Guide, and if not, the DC Style Guide guided the style.

As such, even for people who aren’t necessarily comics fans, the Style Guide has a kind of nostalgic appeal. I sent a a friend of mine a link to my Mail Call post and while he was never a comic reader he commented on how familiar the art felt, and how everything looked “the way I remember it.”

This reproduction of the original – which was distributed in a three-ring binder – was created using multiple copies of the original guides that Standards Manual owns. As such, it’s not an exact replica of the original from 1982 in either form or substance, as it includes updated content from a later edition, and is a hardbound book rather than looseleaf pages in a binder.

(As an aside, there is a part of me that wants to scan and print out my own copies and create a binder version, but that is a part of me that is much more ambitious than the rest of me and will likely continue to be shouted down.)

However, the manner in which the pages were scanned and printed gives us the look of the originals. We can see the yellowing of the pages and the holes punched in them for the binder. The effect is sufficiently realistic that at times you think you can pick the looseleaf page up from the page it’s printed on.

For example, this picture of a color swatch taped to the back of a page looks like it’s actually physically taped to the page.

As fantastic as the art is, as someone who’s actually worked in desktop publishing and has done some of the old-school, pre-computer work of the type that would have been involved in using the Style Guide, when cutting and pasting involved actual cutting and pasting, and has had to deal with the vagaries of color-matching, the written guidance that accompanies the art is also fascinating to me.

In any case, that’s probably enough of the jibber-jabber, and so I’ll close out with what is the main appeal of this long-sought after sacred artifact: the art.

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