1977 Star Wars Han Solo & Chewbacca Rick Hoberg Rudy Nebres 0

[jgallo]

1977 Star Wars Han Solo & Chewbacca Rick Hoberg Rudy Nebres

Star Wars Han and Chewbacca Piece -Rick Hoberg Rudo Nebres

Trying to figure out what this piece is and if it was unused 

Board is about 12x15 with an overlay that has the black ink and the board has the colors.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks

 

James G

[comicwiz]

This appears to be a colour guide for an unpublished pin-up that was intended to be used for Marvel Super Edition #3 (treasury-sized collected edition of Marvel SW #1-6).

Edited April 27, 2017 by comicwiz

[jgallo]

36 minutes ago, comicwiz said:

This appears to be a colour guide for an unpublished pin-up that was intended to be used for Marvel Super Edition #3 (treasury-sized collected edition of Marvel SW #1-6).

What are you basing this on?  Issue 3 came out in 78 this is dated 77.  No pin ups in issue 1 and the pins ups in three were done by different artists.  

Also this is not a color guide, certainly not like any color guide I have ever seen.  The black is on an acetate overlay with the colors painted directly onto the board.

 

James G

[comicwiz]

This is the original art. Like I said, yours very likely is a colour guide. I have covers and pages which were published the following year from when they were first created or CCA stamped.

[jgallo]

Well thanks for the link.  Have you seen other color guides done like this, everyone I have seen is generally a copy of the inks and then colored in, this is the opposite....

We still don't know what it is though...

 

James G

[malvin]

1 minute ago, jgallo said:

Well thanks for the link.  Have you seen other color guides done like this, everyone I have seen is generally a copy of the inks and then colored in, this is the opposite....

We still don't know what it is though...

 

James G

I have seen lots of colour guides like that.  I have one:

dinosaurs for hire issue 1 cover

and have seen others over the years.

Malvin

 

[comicwiz]

3 hours ago, jgallo said:

Well thanks for the link.  Have you seen other color guides done like this, everyone I have seen is generally a copy of the inks and then colored in, this is the opposite....

We still don't know what it is though...

 

James G

There are a couple of versions of colour guides, that I've seen anyway.

The black ink acetate overlay with hand-coloured illustration board backing is quite common. Although I don't own many, I have an RGB #1 archive linked on CAF showing the progression from sketches to final inked pages. Those coloured pages are colour guides created similar to yours. Here is one of them from the story:

The other I've seen are for Sunday pages, and are quite rare. They are hand coloured on a semi-translucent paper stock over a stat to keep the colours inside the lines when hand colouring them and uses numbering.  The first image is the hand-coloured overlay, and the second is the stat, with the overlay out of the picture, but taped on the end to flip up. When you place the overlay over the stat, you can see the lines from the stat coming through from behind.  This was included with the Sunday OA when I bought it.

Edited April 28, 2017 by comicwiz

[comicwiz]

48 minutes ago, jgallo said:

We still don't know what it is though...

I saw the OA and contacted the seller out of general interest. I collect SW OA and treasuries are a guilty collecting pleasure of mine. What I mentioned is what I know and have been told. You're welcome to contact the artist to confirm.

[Bird]

Man that is one ugly Chewie!

[comiconxion]

What you have there is a color blueline - not to be confused with a color guide.  The difference is that bluelines were typically shot as part of the printing process and would be reproduced exactly as they were colored in the printed book.  A color guide was handed to the printer so that they could create the final color printing plates for the comics.   Higher end books from the 80's like Dark Knight, Punisher Return to Big Nothing, American Flagg, and others used this blueline process.  The only art that is real on the bluelines is the coloring.  The B&W art is reproduced and laid over the color art to create the final image.  It's called a blueline, because they start with a blueline reproduction of the B&W art and color on top of it. 

So, not sure who the colorist was, it could have been Hoberg or Nebres, but was typically someone else.  Price wise, these go for a fraction of what the B&W art would go for.  The most expensive bluelines I've ever seen have been ones from Dark Knight or the Zeck Punisher portfolio.  While the B&W originals for those pieces may sell in the $25-50k range, the bluelines would typically sell for 5-10% of that value.  That still adds up when you're talking a big ticket item, but isn't close to the value of the B&W art.  In this case, if you value the B&W art around $2500 (as it listed for sale on the website), that would be put the value of the blueline in the $125-250 range. 

 

 

Edited April 27, 2017 by comiconxion

[ESeffinga]

^ What he said! ^

Shouldn't confuse color guides with blueline colors. See this all the time.
 

[comicwiz]

FWIW I've always understood colour "blue line" to be an accurate representation of how the colours would look in print, whereas ink asorbency in newsprint had to be colour coded to retain a certain intensity to achieve the desired print result.  From what I've seen, there seems to be more period use of "blue line" production art around the "modern" era when higher quality paper stock was being used rather than the standard stock newsprint paper.  That period doesn't quite fit in with what the OP refers to as '77 production art, unless they requested it on the off-chance they needed to switch it from an interior to rear cover pin-up.  While there might be a good explanation to how this fits in to that stage of the production art process, I'm not sure the explanation given fits the context of this piece without some further elaboration.

Edited April 28, 2017 by comicwiz

[ESeffinga]

Fir enough, and you are correct, that the big influx of blueline coloring tended to start mid-80s for the reasons you mention.

It definitely looks blueline as the production method. So then the question becomes, when? Just because the drawing was created in the late 70s, doesn't mean the trans and color job was.

Was this colored for a reprint volume/magazine at that time period? Maybe.
Could be a case of someone had a line transparency made from the unused OA, and then colored for their own benefit? Seems unlikely though.

Hard to say, unless someone recognizes it from being printed in color in something.