Last week, I wondered aloud about the skin tone of a character in Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver’s upcoming time-spanning SHIELD. In short, Imhotep, Egyptian doctor and Agent of SHIELD (Officer of SHIELD?), was modern-day white, rather than ancient Egypt brown.

I emailed Dustin Weaver with a link to the post, and he wrote back pretty quickly. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially, it was a mistake in the production process. He’s done a lot of research on the book to try and make sure things make sense, and that’s something that slipped through the cracks when doing color tests. He’s gonna try to get them fixed in the trade, if Marvel’s amenable to it. He’s a pretty cool guy.

Just an update!

edit: I asked Dustin to quote a bit of his email and he agreed. In his own words:

Oh, man, you’re right! I’m embarrassed and shocked that I didn’t catch this mistake before it was finished. I’m surprised nobody caught this mistake.
The 2 page spread of the Egyptians fighting the Brood was the very first thing that got colored for this book and it was the testing page for the style of this whole series. I think it went through 4 different versions before we got something we liked. I think with all this back and forth with the style of the thing we missed the fact that they were white. I feel pretty stupid. I seriously did a lot of research to get a lot of the details right. To miss something so blatant is embarrassing.

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Posted in brief bits, Colored Commentary by david brothers |