Carl Gafford

Carl Gafford (November 23, 1953–July 13, 2020) was a colorist (and occasional editor) who worked for several decades in the comics industry. He worked for a number of publishers during his career, including Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and Topps Comics. Gafford was notable for his use of the "color hold" technique in his coloring work (where the black areas of the art are replaced with another color).

Carl Gafford was a member of comics fandom as a teen, writing and drawing his own ditto machine fanzine Minotaur from 1968 to 1972, as well as contributing art and writing to other fanzines and the amateur press alliance CAPA-alpha ("K-a") beginning in December 1970. In c. 1968, he created Blue Plaque Publications, the first minicomic co-op, a cooperative of minicomic creators that traded and promoted small press comics and fanzines, that exists to this day.

Gafford had an itinerant path through higher education, attending Western Connecticut State University for two years, the University of Massachusetts Boston for one year, and San Francisco State University for one year. He earned his B.A. in history from the College of Staten Island.

Gafford began his professional career at DC Comics as an assistant proofreader in the production department in March 1973, and was promoted to full proofreader at the end of the year with the retirement of Gerta Gattel. Gafford started coloring feature pages in the production department, eventually doing regular freelance coloring beginning with Justice League of America #115. He was promoted to assistant production manager in August 1974 and began work on DC's in-house fanzine, The Amazing World of DC Comics, doing editing, writing, production work and color separations.

Gafford moved to San Francisco in September 1976, then to Los Angeles in 1977 to color and write for the Hanna-Barbera comics produced for Marvel Comics. Titles included Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, Laff-A-Lympics and others. During this time, Gafford also worked in Hanna-Barbera's layout department on such TV shows as Godzilla and Super Friends before returning to New York City in August 1978. Gafford went to work in Marvel Comics' production department, first as a freelancer then as the staff typesetter.

Gafford left Marvel in January 1981 and began freelancing for both DC and Marvel, one of the few colorists to work at both companies at the same time.^{[citation needed]} He returned to staff at DC in the summer of 1981 as the proofreader, then by year's end had become Len Wein's assistant editor on Justice League, The Flash, Teen Titans, and the Batman books. At this time, Gafford became editor of Adventure Comics Digest, and with writer Bob Rozakis revived the Challengers of the Unknown, with art first by George Tuska and later by Alex Toth. Gafford also wrote most of the short-lived Creeper backup series in The Flash, featuring British artist Dave Gibbons' first work for DC — though most of the scripts were scrapped after a change of editors. He colored the second-to-last issue and was the artist on the final back-up.

During this time, Gafford began coloring The Legion of Super-Heroes with #288, and continued on that run for seven years without missing an issue, totaling 125 regular issues, giants, miniseries and two different Legion books a month for a year.

Gafford returned to freelance coloring for DC and Marvel in summer 1982.