Star Hawks: Retro Coloring

I’m a big fan of Gil Kane from his work on Marvel covers, Spider-Man, Green Lantern, and a myriad other projects. Last year, I discovered his work on the Star Hawks sci-fi comic strip from the late 70s/early 80s via IDW reprinting of the strip. I was immediately enamored by size of the strip, as it’s very similar to the size of our Tiegre strip. I very quickly read the first story line and was hooked. My goal as an artist and as a collector is to have one representative piece of original art for all my influences. I knew that the Gil Kane piece in my collection had to be from Star Hawks.

I purchased the original art for a Gil Kane Star Hawk Sunday strip (see Image 1). A few days later, I found a well preserved copy of a newspaper featuring the same strip in color with a mis-registered yellow plate (see Image 2). I purchased it off of eBay, and then set out to create a digital version of the original colors. Unfortunately, the newspaper chose to remove the title graphic, so I had to use the colors from a different strip recreate the colors for the title graphic (see Image 3). 

Here you can see the final version (see Image 4) and a close-up of the final panel featuring the half tone dots that the original printing would have had.

The art for this strip is actually by Ernie Colon.