The 2023 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Colorist

Tamra Bonvillain wins this year’s award!

December 20, 2023, 12:30pm

Coloring in American comics is the part of the artform that evolves the fastest, and has changed the most in the last decade. Since the 1990s and the advent of digital coloring, the art has become incredibly complex and the results can be stunning. Nevertheless, it can be an underappreciated part of comics art, since it often only really stands out when something is wrong. That’s one of the reasons we make it a point to call out excellent colors in our reviews, and this year’s nominees for the Golden Issue for Best Colorist are, and have been for years, some of the most respected artists in the field. Working on some of DC and Marvel’s biggest books, they’re held to the industry’s highest standards — because when you have that kind of distribution and print quality, every pixel counts.

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And the winner for the 2023 ComicBook.com Golden Issue Award for Best Colorist is

Tamra Bonvillain!

Bonvillain is no stranger to the Golden Issue Awards, having taken home this title in 2017 and 2018. Since then, her work has continued to stay strong and evolve, and her approach — bold colors and striking contrast — help her stand out.

Working on Batman/Superman: World’s Finest, ,Bonvillain had a great showcase for her talent…but also a ton of challenges, as the lead characters obviously have totally different tones and thrive in different environments. She also had to evoke the feeling of alternative timelines like the one from othe highly-stylized and incredibly specific Kingdom Come, as the book started multiverse-hopping in the back half of the year.

In addition to her monthly super-book, Bonvillain showed a different, more gritty side of her skillset in this year’s Boom! Studios breakout hit Animal Pound (with writer Tom King, artist Peter Gross, and letterer Clayton Cowles). The disparity between corporate superhero comics and Animal Pound is even more pronounced than the difference between coloring for Superman and Batman, and shows exactly how broad her abilities are.

Bonvillain also contributed some gorgeous work to DC’s annual DC Pride anthology, and her work on Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur might not have happened this year, but the new animated series, with hits gloriously garish colors, has brought a new wave of readers to appreciate that book.

Here’s the full list of this year’s Best Colorist nominees: