Color Guides and Final Color Art

I have owned quite a few color guides over the years. I had never seen or heard of such things until I attended an auction one evening at the first of the annua; San Diego Comic Book Conventions at the U.S. Grant Hotel in August 1970. D.C. Comics had sent a representative with some original production art to sell at the auction. There were few bidders in the room and the guy from D.C. was getting frustrated that few items were selling and those that sold went for low prices. He kept insulting the audience, calling them "pikers" and other derogatory names. When he offered the first set of color guides, I bid the huge sum of $10 for the complete guides for an issue of Batman. This set included a great splash page of Batman saving a child from the upper floor of a burning building. The guides were still in their original envelope from World Color Press, the printer of comic books. The D.C. rep praised me for my class (lol) and before he called it a day, he offered to sell me another set of guides. I chose an issue of Lois Lane. I really loved my purchases, since the colors were so vivid, but I had no idea how I could buy more. In early 1971, I attended the only comic convention that ever took place at the Disneyland Hotel. In the dealers' room, some people from Marvelmania International were selling color guides that Marvel had sent them in connection with the short-lived groups production of marvel-related merchandise. The guides were really cheap -- $1 a page, and they weren't selling. Few knew what they were. So I bought up all the ones I liked; probably the best was for the Spider-Man Marvelmania poster, which cost a bit more. Later in the day, Carmine Infantino, the then publisher of D.C. Comics gave a presentation. Afterwards, I approached him to see if there was any way I could buy all of D.C.'s color guides after the printers were finished with them. He said that he didn't know why I would want them, since aniline dyes were used for the colors and such dyes faded away over time. I assumed that he knew what he was talking about, but I saw over the years that the colors did not fade if the guides were kept away from light. In any event, I didn't think too much about color guides for almost two decade -- until Jack Abel, one of D.C.'s main colorists, advertised a large number of color guides for sale in the late 1980s. I bought a few for some of the covers to Jack Kirby's Fourth World titles, including the first issue of Mr. Miracle, and for the cover of Kamandi No. 1. At about the same time, someone was set up at tha San Diego Con who had full sets of guides for recent D.C. and Marvel comics for about $15 per set. He had obviously succeeded in doing what I tried to do with Infantino nearly 20 years earlier.