10/04/2026
A PIECE OF COMIC BOOK HISTORY JUST WALKED INTO TATERTOT!
If you watched the video and wondered, “What the heck is a photostat?”... here you go!
Before comics were produced almost entirely with digital files, publishers needed physical production materials to get artwork from the drawing board to the printed comic. Photostats, or “stats,” were photographic reproductions used during that production process.
And these things are COOL!
Look closely and you can see pieces of the process that readers were never supposed to see. Crop and registration marks, handwritten page and issue numbers, corrections, paste-ups, masking, production notes and even the wear left behind from actually being used.
These aren’t original hand-drawn comic pages, and that’s important. They’re something different: surviving pieces of the production process that helped turn comic art into the books that eventually landed on spinner racks.
And there are some BIG characters represented here.
Spider-Man. Venom. Carnage. The Avengers. Fantastic Four. X-Men. And plenty more.
Some of these are clean. Some are messy. Some have tape, markings, blacked-out areas and all kinds of weird production scars and frankly, that’s part of what makes them awesome!
We went through this collection, identified what we could, and picked out some of our favorites. The photostats shown are available for purchase at Tatertot Comics & Collectibles, with prices varying depending on the piece.
These are the sort of comic collectibles you don't see hanging on a wall every day.
Watch the video, take a closer look, and tell us which one YOU would hang in your comic room.
And if one catches your eye, message us or stop by the shop before somebody else claims it!
"Super Power Cool Dude" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
