Artist catalog & profile

Laura Martin

Comics colorist whose collaborations include Planetary, The Authority, Astonishing X-Men, The Ultimates and The Stand.

Artist Profile

A career in context

Laura Martin began coloring comics professionally in 1995 after completing a commercial-art degree at the University of Central Florida. Her first job at Wildstorm was computer color separation: translating hand-colored guides into Photoshop for titles including WildC.A.T.s, StormWatch and Gen13. As the studio moved away from painted guides, she became responsible for the creative coloring of individual titles. Her official biography identifies Planetary and The Authority as the work behind her Eisner recognition.

After leaving Wildstorm in 2000, Martin freelanced for Marvel and DC before joining CrossGen in 2001, where she colored Ruse and Negation. She returned to freelance work in 2004. Her collaborations include Astonishing X-Men with John Cassaday, The Ultimates with Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary, Thor with Olivier Coipel, and The Stand with Mike Perkins. Her broader credits encompass Serenity, Spawn, Armor Hunters, The Rocketeer and Ragnarök, spanning superhero, science-fiction, horror and adventure comics.

Martin has described a workflow rooted in the script and the needs of each scene. In interviews she explains cleaning and preparing scanned line art, separating shapes into flat colours, selecting a palette, then adding highlights, shadows and effects. For The Stand, she used different palettes to distinguish simultaneous locations and adjusted contrast to guide attention toward important story elements. She sends proofs to the creative team before preparing final files for print. Her own art practice also includes watercolours and small traditional paintings.

CoverLineage noteMartin’s catalog includes a shared credit with Derec Donovan on The Cobalt Cricket #1 and the color contribution to Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary’s StormWatch #4. These records connect her to Spider-Man #1 and The Dark Knight Returns #1 while retaining the collaborative credits.

Catalog connections

Across the archive

This artist appears in 3 indexed catalogs. Explore the lineages below, then open individual covers for edition details and credited roles. The Dungeon Crawler Carl title catalog can overlap with the composition catalogs.