Rare production cover/art 0

[AndrewCup]

I was looking around eBay and found these:

Can someone shed some light on what these are - I have a good guess, but I'm not sure how to tell if these are authentic or what?  Seem like a neat keepsake at a reasonable price, but is it too good to be true?  One of a kind?  Thanks for any help/advice in this area.

[catman76]

Stuff from the days before everything went totally digital when they had to make transparencies for color separations and all the separate elements that had to be made into printing plates. Most of it was tossed out I am sure so there's probably not a lot of it around.

[Dave2739]

In the early days of my newspaper production career, we called those "color keys". We'd give them to the pressmen as a reference for how the finished page or ad or whatever should look like when printed. Those went away once color laser printers became a thing.

[F For Fake]

Try the Original Art forum. Lots of information there. Most "production art" pieces are fakes, or worthless, or both. There IS a market for true hand colored separations, but this isn't that. But yeah, dig around i the OA threads, lots of good info there!

[kav]

@James J Johnson

[90sChild]

2 hours ago, Dave2739 said:

In the early days of my newspaper production career, we called those "color keys". We'd give them to the pressmen as a reference for how the finished page or ad or whatever should look like when printed. Those went away once color laser printers became a thing.

I'm assuming there was more than one made too..  I've seen these color keys listed over and over ad nauseam on ebay so I'm not sure that I would automatically assume they are rare which means valuable.  That would at least explain the cheap prices I tend to see.

 

Edited August 7, 2020 by 90sChild

[Dave2739]

3 hours ago, 90sChild said:

I'm assuming there was more than one made too..  I've seen these color keys listed over and over ad nauseam on ebay so I'm not sure that I would automatically assume they are rare which means valuable.  That would at least explain the cheap prices I tend to see.

 

I can't comment on the specific Wolverine issue listed above, but in my experience, we could produce as many color keys as we wanted. One for pressmen, one to give to the advertisers, another for the guy featured in the article, etc. They were used as often in production as they were as gifts to the advertisers or people featured in articles. 

[AndrewCup]

Thank you all for your response here.  I'll now head over to the original art section.  

[Ditch Fahrenheit]