This is what the printed cover would have looked like.
I bought a little piece of forgotten comic book history on eBay this week but first let’s start on some of my art. I have this series of drawings that I do called “Covers to comics that don’t exist.” I like comic book covers a lot and draw my own. “Dreams of Things” and “Psychedelic Dreamer” are two of my made up comic book series that I’ve drawn covers for lately. I never draw the insides of these comics, that would take way too long, but I do draw the covers. I love the esthetics of comic book covers. Especially twentieth century comics.
As I’ve wrote about recently one of the category of things I’ve purchased on eBay has been old comic book production art. Specifically the negatives of comic book covers that were used to make the printing plates. Most people would have no idea what to do with these but since I’m an old comic book production guy I can scan them in and can make nice prints from those scans. I did just that with an old Harvey comic. Bunny #21.
I bought those negatives to Bunny #21 back in November of 2023 (it’s March 22, 2025 as I write this) so, last month, I decided to see if there were any other comic book cover production negative to be found on eBay. There was only one. It was a cover to a Bugs Bunny comic and it didn’t seem to me like a particularly good cover. I didn’t buy it but I was thinking about it because it was the only one on eBay.
Then, last week, I took another look on eBay to check out that cover. It still didn’t thrill me but when I searched for more cover negatives a whole bunch of them showed up. It was one comic book store and they posted about twenty sets of comic book cover production negatives. They were all from Harvey Comics in the 1970s.
My favorite Harvey comic from when I was a kid was “Hot Stuff: The Little Devil.” I checked to see if there were any of those and there were. I decided I was going to get a Hot Stuff set of negatives to make a print out of.
This seller only had pictures of the negatives. There was no picture of the actual comic to see what the cover really looked like. So I decided to use the Grand Comic Book Database to look up what the covers looked like. I checked the issue number on the auction listing and looked up that issue on the GCBDB. I downloaded the picture of each cover so I could easily compare them and make a decision.
Uncropped scan.
I wanted a Hot Stuff cover but me being me I decided to do my due diligence and look up all the other covers too. Who knows? Maybe there would be one I liked better than any of the Hot Stuff covers.
As I was looking up each issue I ran into an anomaly. There were a couple of “Little Lotta” comics on the list but when I put issue 121 into the search engine it didn’t come up with an image. So I went to the Little Lotta series on the GCBDB and it only had 120 issues listed and indexed. That was weird. I went and checked the wikipedia page for the series and that’s where I read that it had 120 issues but issue 121 was advertised.
The next thing that I did was to check the picture of the negatives closely. The seller could have made a mistake and put the wrong issue number on the auction. I turned the negative into a positive and zoomed in. I could clearly see the issue number was 121. There you go.
It was a “Buy It Now” on eBay so that’s exactly what I did. I bought it then. With tax and shipping the set of negatives were around $50. That’s not a small amount of money to me but it’s about what these things run. That’s also on the lower side of prices for old comic book production art.
Often I see auctions for just a stat or film positive of the black plate of old comic book pages and people want hundreds of dollars for them. I can see why the negatives are cheaper though. A stat or film positive of a black plate looks like the original art. You can stick it in a frame and hang it on your wall and it’ll look good. It’s a nice “Objet d’art.”
These film negatives that I bought don’t look good on their own. You have to know what to do with them. You have to scan them in on a transparency scanner and paste them together digitally in the proper way. The cyan plate has to go in the cyan channel, magenta in magenta, yellow in yellow, and the black plate has to go in the black channel. This is easy for me but your average comic book fan doesn’t know anything about that.
By the way, despite having three scanners that I regularly use, I don’t have an 8.5×11 inch transparency scanner to scan these in. But the school I teach at does. So I’m going to scan these in there when I have the chance. I was actually looking up how much a 8.5×11 transparency scanner would cost and full retail on one is around $1200. A used one on eBay is around $700. I don’t think I’ll be getting one anytime soon.
I still want to get the cover negatives to one of the “Hot Stuff” covers. There were also some nice “Spooky” (he’s a ghost) covers. I even liked one of the “Little Dot” covers. At $50 a piece I’m not going to get any of them any time soon but they’ll probably hang around on eBay for a while. As I wrote before I don’t think there are a lot of people out there who know what to do with them.
Meanwhile I’ll have to scan in “Little Lotta” #121 and make myself a print of it. It’s a real life “Cover to a Comic Book that Doesn’t Exist.”