A UNIQUE SELECTION OF ORIGINAL, HAND COLORED & HAND ANNOTATED COMIC ART: CARL BARKS, DON ROSA, WILLIAM VAN HORN

CARL BARKS, DON ROSA AND WILLIAM VAN HORN

ORIGINAL PRODUCTION ART – COLOR GUIDES

HAND PAINTED (IN WATER COLORS) & HAND ANNOTATED BY SCOTT ROCKWELL FOR THE PRODUCTION OF GLADSTONE'S DISNEY COMICS AND COMIC ALBUMS IN THE 1990S

From our personal collection of original Walt Disney art, we now offer a selection of hand painted and hand signed comic art page color guides that were produced between 1993 and 1998 for Gladstone Publishing when Bruce Hamilton was alive and well. The color guides include the comic art of Carl Barks, Don Rosa and William Van Horn. As such, and especially since Bruce Hamilton, Carl Barks are no longer with us and Don Rosa no longer draws his wonderful Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories, and William Van Horn is now 85 years old, these examples of the amazing story telling and artistry of three masters of their trade are scarce, even unique, and for collectors, most desirable and valuable.

Scott Rockwell’s professional use of watercolors to “colorize” the stories makes them “pop” off of each page with vibrant shades and hues, giving the stories a vibrant life that couldn’t be achieved in the final printed form. This is the best way to enjoy these stories, in our opinion.

These color guide pages are offered for sale as complete, individual stories --- 82 of them in total. In their entirety, there are 1564 pages of original, hand colored and annotated and hand signed pages of art. The stories are some of the best written and illustrated by the respective artists. Each story is one-of-a-kind and a wonderful addition to any collection of Carl Barks, Don Rosa and/or William Van Horn art works.

The stories are offered at a fixed cost per page of art times the number of pages in each story: Carl Barks at $25 per page; Don Rosa at $23 per page; William Van Horn at $20 per page. The spread sheet provided below lists each story title with the number of hand colored and annotated and signed pages, and the cost per story.

In order to provide some perspective to the importance of these pieces of original art,  here are some background/reference details.

REFERENCE: Scott Rockwell was employed in a freelance capacity as a colorist for Gladstone Comics during the 1980s and between 1993 and 1998.

REFERENCE: Bruce Hamilton was founder and owner of Another Rainbow Publishing and Gladstone Publishing from inception to his death in 2005. Among other ventures, he published comics, limited edition art lithographs and anthologies of the collected works of Carl Barks.

REFERENCE: Another Rainbow Publishing was founded in 1981 by Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran. Produced the Carl Barks Library from 1983 through mid-1990.

REFERENCE: Gladstone Publishing was founded in 1985 by Bruce Hamilton as a licensee and publisher of the Disney Comic Books for artists including Paul Murray and Floyd Gottfredson, Don Rosa and William Van Horn.

REFERENCE: Between 1993 and 1998, Gladstone published “graphic novels” that reprinted the “classic” stories of Carl Barks using “new colors”. These novels were intended to be archival versions of the original stories. Eventually, the novels included stories from Don Rosa and William Van Horn. To support the concept of specifying new coloring, Gladstone hired several colorists to hand-color photocopies of the completed black and white art work, adding the color codes necessary to enable the color separators to colorize the artwork for publication. Scott Rockwell was one of those colorists, supplying the hand-colored, hand-coded pages for many of Carl Barks’ and Don Rosa’s and William Van Horn’s most significant stories. Because of the hours of hand-painting and hand-color-coding involved in each page of each story, the surviving pages today represent original artwork that is historical with respect to the graphic novels produced by Gladstone some 30+ years ago. NOTE: after approximately 1998, the colorization of pages changed from being a hand-painted activity involving a human being’s creativity and actual hand artistry, to a computerized activity. No computerized colorings are included in these pages, as these are all original, hand painted and annotated art.

REFERENCE: In 1998, Gladstone Publishing stopped production of the Disney Comics and then returned to Scott Rockwell his original hand painted, hand annotated pages. This fact is key, as it gave Scott Rockwell an opportunity to offer his art to the public. In 2004, L & M Enterprises USA LLC acquired the entire remaining collection of pages/stories from Scott Rockwell and at that time Scott hand signed EVERY page of his original hand painted and hand annotated art.

REFERENCE: With respect to this offering, each page of hand-painted, hand-color-coded art is 8 ½ inches X 11 inches with a “live-image” area of approximately 6 1/8 inches X 8 ¾ inches. Color-Codes are marked into the margins. Each page is notated at the top with the comic issue number and story page number. Each page is hand-signed by Scott Rockwell in a lower corner, either right or left.

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The art we are offering consists of hand-painted and annotated copies of the comic art pages that Bruce Hamilton published in Gladstone Publishing in various editions. The pages were hand-painted by colorist Scott Rockwell, and then "marked-up" by Rockwell with the color codes to be used for the color separator during printing of the comics. Scott Rockwell hand-signed each page of art after painting and coding. Each page now stands alone as an original piece of art, colored, coded and signed, a piece of historical art memorializing the work of Barks, Rosa, and Van Horn.

…but the story does not stop with each page of art. This collection includes the COMPLETE stories published by Gladstone, from title page to final scene, with as many as 32 pages of hand colored, coded, and signed art for each story.

The collection includes all of the stories in the accompanying list, to include:

Fifty-six Carl Bark's stories, including: In Old California, Sheriff of Bullet Valley, In Ancient Persian, Land of the Pygmy Indians, Back to Long Ago, The Flying Dutchman, The Paul Bunyan Machine, The Golden Nugget Boat.

Fifteen Don Rosa’s stories, including: El Dorado, The Last Sled to Dawson, The Lost Charts of Columbus.

Eleven Van Horn’s stories, including: The Amazon Queen, Catman vs Masked Marauder.

The 82 stories are classic Barks, Rosa and Van Horn stories that Bruce Hamilton republished in color in the Gladstone editions in the 1990s.

Scans of three pages from Carl Bark's Land of the Pygmy Indians are shown to illustrate examples of these works of art. All of the stories include pages hand colored, hand annotated with color codes, and hand signed, as shown in these three example pages.

In total, we have approximately 82 stories by Barks, Rosa and Van Horn totaling approximately 1564 pages of original colored art work. The stories are available for sale individually at the prices indicated in the following spread sheet. Contact L & M Enterprises USA LLC by phone or email in inquire about availablity and to request images of the stories that interest you.

Phone:  319-360-2873  &  Email: LMENTERPRISES@MCHSI.COM