Wednesday 7 October 2015

Original Art - Thunderbirds

I noticed that Illustration Art Gallery have added a Bellamy to their original art which is for sale.

It looks to be in very good condition

Thunderbirds from TV21 #206


It's selling for Price: £1,750.00 / $2,625.00 / €2.275,00 to quote them

Just for your enjoyment here are the two pages published back in December 1968. Interestingly the original shows a different colour in the second panel. I don't have access to my copy of the comic to check this isn't just an aberration in scanning the page, but must confess I prefer the original. I see that in 2010 the second page sold for £2420 (including buyer's premium) so this looks like a bargain!

Note the pink!



3 comments:

Kid said...

The colour variation is interesting, perhaps being a victim of the printing process. When Mike Noble took over the XL5 strip in TV21, he used a certain colour of ink (I think) to render outer space, but it was very washed out when printed and he had to change to another to get the effect he wanted. When one sees the pages in the Signum books which were reprinted from original art, the colours are far more vibrant. However, the TV21 pages were also printed from the original art, so the printing process back in the '60s couldn't have been as good as exists today.

Mike Nicoll said...

The original is very faded of course Kid and I wondered if it's because this was one of the pieces used in the travelling Anderson exhibition from the 1980's which I saw in Edinburgh (who knows dude - our paths may have crossed way back then!) but unfortuately had no camera to record - all those years touring the galleries of Britain in constant highly lit showcases and exposed to daylight must have taken it's toll. I recall the second page of this strip was also on display and am fairly sure that original is also quite light-damaged. That said I completely agree that it's a sad loss to the reals of "damn good art" that so many of these originals will never be reproduced as they should have been so I'm grateful that the last set of reprints at least had some original art in the selection. I think we can safely say we will never see art like this again simply because CS10 board no longer exists and the replacements on offer are poor imitations - and the skill sets involved in creating such art are fast being lost due to lack of opportunity.

Kid said...

Let's hope that developing technology allows scans from actual comics to be reproduced closer to what they'd be if taken from the original art, eh? Steve Holland, as far as I know, didn't have the actual art when he worked on the facsimile of Look & Learn #1, but the quality is excellent.