Four colour comics question 0

[tv horror]

Four colour comics question

I recently posted in the Golden age thread about a moment of madness were I had decided to ink my EC library volumes (on reflection NO) long story short leads to my question. I'm familiar with the term four colour comics, however how many colours were actually used? As it was EC I'm interested in can anyone let me know as I think this would be very interesting to know. 

[Unca Ben]

CMYK

Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (the key).

Edited June 20, 2017 by Unca Ben

[tv horror]

So it's basically inkjet printer colours? However I thought that people such as Marie Severin inked the pages before hand and used a number of colours, that's the question I wanted to know. Thank you for the reply unca Ben maybe I should have explained it a bit better. 

[Brian Peck]

4 colours but 5 plates were and are used in printing comics. They break the colours in the comics down to Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black but then they print a 2nd black plate from the original inked artwork. This allows the black inks to stand out. If they printed just the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black plates of the coloured artwork the inks links would not stand out like they do in most comic books.

[Unca Ben]

2 hours ago, tv horror said:

So it's basically inkjet printer colours? However I thought that people such as Marie Severin inked the pages before hand and used a number of colours, that's the question I wanted to know. Thank you for the reply unca Ben maybe I should have explained it a bit better. 

They can combine the three colors, and this along with halftoning (small dots) produces a range of colors.