IIRC, most of Shatter's run at First was on newsprint. The mushy spread of the dithered blacks and the watercolor colors created a pretty grimy look that harmon

IIRC, most of Shatter's run at First was on newsprint. The mushy spread of the dithered blacks and the watercolor colors created a pretty grimy look that harmonized well with the gritty noir tone of the narration, IMHO. It certainly looked different from anything else on the shelves; clean ink lines with occasional patches of flat mechanical tone were the rule. The US comics industry largely ran on newsprint at the time Shatter came out. At the beginning of the eighties there were a few prestige titles on better paper but it wasn't until the early nineties that pretty much everyone had moved to it.