Sometimes you just have to ask the right questions, right? This post is Moby’s way of sharing one of his learning experiences. Not a bad one really, but it offers a thing or two that can be learned.
A while back, Moby won an auction for some cover art, the cover to Heroic Publishing’s ‘The Infinites‘ #4. Yay.
I got it for a steal, probably not even enough to cover shipping. So being a collector and all around nice guy, Moby contacted the seller to see if there was anything else available.
Why yes…only the original artwork for the entire issue, and the next. Yay.
Long story short, I got some scans, some pages were inked and others not so inked, and I bought the lot for a small amount. Yay.
Now here’s the lesson, and I am not at all upset about this one, but I did learn a thing or two. Namely, make sure the scans are of the actual art and not the production work-ups or whatever they are called.
Here are a couple of examples:
First is a splash page. Note the guard in the lower right appears twice in the scan sent to Moby and the final published page, but not in the original.
No big deal, not upset. Interesting actually.
But then I saw the final splash, and this one was kinda sad for Moby. Notice the head/face in the background? Well, on the actual art page the head is just sort of scribbled in. I had to adjust the colors for the blue pencils to show, but you should get the idea.
There must have been a separate page for the head. Now, I was told that there were a page or two missing, and that is fine, but I was not told that the scans were anything other than the actual, original artwork.
Like the first example, the image sent was a composite, I assume from the production. Notice the difference in the art boards:
So the more I looked, the more things were not quite what I thought I was getting. The inked art was inked over blue-lines and such. Moby could pile on, but you get the idea.
Again, I’m not really upset about it either. I still have almost two complete issues worth of ‘originals’. Hey, anybody want to buy a comic book?
