Matt Wagner's Batman Vs Grendel Color Original

The main reason I bid on this was that it was a Hero Initiative auction, otherwise, as cool as this looked, I may have let it go. Another smaller reason I bid on this was that, a while ago, I traded a nice Matt Wagner original page from the first Batman/Grendel crossover and, though I've looked for another to replace it, pages from those two books rarely show up, and really nice pages show up even less, so this was a cheap alternative.


As for what this is, according to Tom Ziuko, a colorist at DC Comics back in the 1980's, it is not a color guide, but a hand-colored promotional display done with Dr. Martin's dyes that was used to publicize the comic at conventions. On the auction site, he wrote,"Back in the 1980s, before the age of scanners and the world wide web, DC Comics reps used to appear at comic book conventions and give slideshow presentations as promotional tools to garner interest in upcoming books and projects that were going to be published. I, along with a few other freelance colorists, was given high quality stats of selected artwork, mounted on matte paper, to be colored and/or airbrushed; these pages were then photographed and shown along with a spoken narration at said conventions."