In 1987, I wrote, Sergio Aragonés drew and Marvel published a graphic novel entitled The Death of Groo. It was one of my favorite Groo projects…or, at least, would have been, had we not had so much trouble with the printing. Tom Luth did his usual terrific coloring job but when it went to press, it went to a low-quality color separator who did a poor job. No, let's be honest here: They did a rotten job. There were folks at Marvel who, upon seeing the proofs, wanted to reject the separations and have them done over but they were overruled.
I suspect — no, we're being honest here. I don't "suspect." I was told that if this kind of work had been done on a Spider-Man or X-Men project — or even by something written by someone on Marvel's editorial staff — there was no way the separations would have been used. But at the time, Marvel was getting a certain amount of grief from dealers because some of their higher-priced items were shipping late. Because of those complaints and because it was Groo, they went ahead and did the First Printing off the bad separations.
After the book came out, they called and said, "Gee, sorry, this came out even worse than we'd anticipated. If the book sells well enough to warrant a Second Printing, we'll redo the color separations and fix everything." At the time they made this promise, I think they assumed the book would not sell well enough to require a Second Printing but, as it turned out, it did. One day a year or two later, Sergio was in New York and he visited the Marvel offices where several folks told him the Second Printing would take place in a few months and they assured him that the separations would be redone. He was pleased by this.
About a half hour after he left that day, I got an embarrassed phone call from a Marvel exec. It seems that, following Sergio's departure, they'd reminded the Manufacturing Division that the color seps on The Death of Groo had to be redone before the book was reprinted. The folks in that division had said, "Oh, didn't you know? One of our other graphic novels is running late and we had to send something to press last week in its place. So we went ahead and did the Second Printing of The Death of Groo!" In other words, even as they were assuring Sergio that things would be fixed before the Second Printing, the Second Printing had already been done…from the old separations that they'd promised wouldn't be used.
Apologies were made. We were told — I don't know if this part's true — that Marvel was going to fill the immediate orders for the Second Printing but toss the rest of the press run away. Someone shipped me a few hundred copies, just to get them out of the warehouse and whittle down the stockpile, the better to justify Pressing #3. Indeed, after a suitable interval, the separations were redone and the Third Printing took place. This version still didn't look as good as the thing should have looked in the first place but it was leagues ahead of the first and second runs.
So if you decide to scare up a copy of The Death of Groo, you have a number of choices, all with downsides. You can try to find a First Printing, but these are all blurry and out-of-register with washed-out colors. You can search for a Second Printing, which looks just as bad. The fact that it's not a First Printing is perhaps balanced by the fact that Second Printings are very rare…or, at least, they will be until some day when I clean out my storage locker and unload a few crates on eBay. Third Printings have decent reproduction but they are, after all, Third Printings.
And you have one other option. Bob Chapman runs a wonderful "boutique" operation called Graphitti Designs that issues fancy, limited-edition books and t-shirts and toys. Often, the limited-edition books are designer editions of cheaper versions published by others. He'll arrange to have the publisher run a thousand or more extra copies of the guts of a book, which will be delivered to Bob unbound. Then Bob will add in more pages, end papers, signed bookplates and other extra features, bind it all in fancy and hard covers, slap on a dust jacket, etc., and you'll have a real snazzy, deluxe permanent edition of the book. They're all beautiful and highly collectible.
This month, he is bringing out a snazzy hardcover that collects The Death of Groo and its sequel/prequel, The Life of Groo. They're bound back-to-back with "flip book" covers and each has a special, signed bookplate prepared for this edition only. (One is signed by Sergio; the other is signed by me and initialed by Sergio.) The printing on The Life of Groo is the same as an earlier edition that Bob himself did, and it looks great. The printing on The Death of Groo is from the run of the Third Printing from Marvel but if you get it in this format, it's not really a Third Printing or even a Fourth. It's the First Printing of the combination package.
This is not really a sales pitch since these books sell out rather quickly and Bob only has a thousand of this one to move, most of which are already spoken for. However, if you wanna grab one, they're selling them at Bob's website, Graphitti Designs. It's around $59 plus shipping but it'll probably cost you more than that to visit Bob's site. It's full of other neat stuff you'll want to buy. (He's bringing out a new Groo t-shirt, soon…)