Muntsa Vicente

Colorists rarely get called visionaries. Muntsa Vicente is the exception. Trained in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and the Glasgow School of Art, she spent years as a celebrated fashion and editorial illustrator — for Elle, La Vanguardia, Harper Collins, and more — before her partner Marcos Martín convinced her to try comics. The result was one of the great color-eras in modern mainstream comics.

Vicente’s breakthrough came on Daredevil in 2012, where her bold, flat palettes made the book’s swashbuckling energy pop off the page. ComicsAlliance devoted an entire “Art of Color” feature to her, praising how she evokes the limited color schemes of Silver Age comics “without letting her own style be subsumed.” But her true signature lives on Panel Syndicate, the DRM-free digital publisher she co-founded with Martín and Brian K. Vaughan. There, her color made The Private Eye’s skyline of “sickly greens and verdant greens” feel like a living, breathing future — and gave Barrier its stark, bilingual, border-crossing tension. She’s also the palette behind Friday, Ed Brubaker’s nostalgic murder-mystery, working in a self-imposed 25/50/75/100 percent color system straight out of ’70s printing, because — as she told The White Space — “you get combinations of colors that maybe you wouldn’t expect but that work very well.”

These days Vicente colors Absolute Batman for DC and swings back to Marvel for stories like the Captain America 50th-anniversary special — always with her eye for “very narrative” color decisions. See her best work in The Private Eye and Barrier, and explore her portfolio of illustration and painting at muntsavicente.com.