Another very curious page from one of my all-time personal favorite runs in comics, the
'Second Karza War.' (Micronauts 25-28)Character and story-wise, this page is notable for featuring the destruction of the Acroyear's planet 'Spartak,' an event which would reverberate through the title for the entire remainder of the run. (And Volume Two, 'The New Voyages, as well)
If you take a moment to look at the Published Color image provided, you'll see that a good chunk of this page would have been drawn on separate blue and red 'surprint' pages. (In those pre-computer days, 'no-black' color effects like what's on display here would have been achieved by drawing the red or blue figures on a separate page, which were then manually added to the appropriate red or blue color plate later in the printing process.)
From a collecting perspective, the typical result would be fragmented pages, like
THIS.
BUT, this one is a little different. At some point, someone took it upon themselves to cut out the art from the surprint pages and manually paste them into place onto their Master Page. Look closely, and you'll see the paste-ups. This may deliver a more pleasant page for viewing, but still gets a little 'tut-tut' from the purist collector in me. It is what it is.
Such after-production 'consolidations' are, in my experience, fairly uncommon. Yet this is the second page I've seen from this short storyline which has had after-market pasteup work done
(the other can be seen here). When shown this page, Pat Broderick maintained he would never have done this, so it must have been a dealer or collector.
It does make me wonder, though. Thumbing through the issues, there are only two other pages from the 'Second Karza War' storyline which would have had surprint work done... I wonder if they are in the same 'consolidated' state? I'd bet they are. Time will tell, I'm certain they'll turn up eventually.
LUV me some Baron Karza pages! MMmmmmmm.
