BLUECHIPCOLLECTIBLES

The only splash I know of that has a hero coming forth from a, ahem, birth canal

Ah, the rare photobucket variant

It may not have Iron Man but those top 2 panels are prime Tony Stark art

Missed an item I wanted today and the established pattern held fast once again. And that pattern is-- If there's something I want and I remember to log in and bid live, I will be outbid by people willing to spend 3X as much and I'll have completely wasted precious time that I can never get back. If there's something I want and I FORGET to log in and bid, I will check to see what it went for it and discover that it sold for 1/3 of what I would have bid.

Normally, you'd think the actual owners of the character would get to say what his first appearance was, and if they said 81, that should be that. It certainly looks as if issue 81 was the first time they first thought this guy would be a continuing character, and that they finessed details of that character in 83.

At a glance you can say that the movie Shazam is "totally different" from the Captain Marvel character, but then as you see the origin in the same, the super details are the same (kid that says Shazam to become here), the kid's name is the same; the "family" of heroes is the same; the villains are the same; the tone is very similar, etc. It's essentially the 1940s character brought to life with some changes made during the 70s

Of all the reactions I might've expected from that, I wouldn't have put anger in the mix.

Possible trend in the future. Sell your big "FIRST APPEARANCE" and buy a nice house, while chuckling to yourself that you still have the actual first appearance.

One of my favorite FF covers.

A copy of the Watcher's 1st appearance once owned by the Watcher himself

I love how they felt the freedom to swing periodically into WW2 science fiction but never lost their touch with grounded and gripping tales (and sometimes they'd combine them in one story)

Actually, Hulk 180 has skyrocketed only because I sold the copy I had

No, because the leaf cast portion would have to be trimmed in order to have any shape resembling the edges of a comic book.

Very good question. I tried to answer with a name or two that pops into my head of someone's whose pieces I liked, I realized that some people might say "that's not abstract. it's _____". And I further realized that while I know I have liked I remembered so few that I cannot recall many visually and there's even fewer pieces to which I could attach a name. So while I have liked a lot of abstract art I've liked little to the degree that I made an effort to remember their names or seek them out latr.

As the one you're quoting/dissing, I will say 1) I do not have artistic skill (so good guess) but 2) that is one major reason why I appreciate artistic skill, just as I enjoy music all the more because I cannot perform (and presumably cannot compose) it myself. I can enjoy music played without skill when it's played by a child or an animal, because then it comes from the heart. But a person who has no skill, makes no effort to employ any, and is just banging keys on a piano and calling me a philistine for not understanding it... I'm not gonna hang around for it, even if some museum decides to pay him a fortune and puts a label in front filled with essentially random words from transcendental meditation chants strung together. 3) I am not down on things that lack skill but show a unique and engaging perspective. There's plenty of abstract art I like, a lot, but not the pieces that are essentially blank canvases or look like someone spilled a drink on it and they're accompanied by a label that is full of con artist speak. Finally, I am mostly talking about people whose pieces show little if any skill beyond mine and do not appear to have anything interesting to say, and even show the very same sort of disdain for pretentious self-proclaimed art lovers that I have myself. I applaud them not for their skill or their vision but for dissing those people openly. I just would prefer not to pay money to see what they've done, because then I feel as if I, too, have been scammed.

This is why a detailed description of the restoration would be better than the alphanumeric scale by itself.

I am not in disgreement about the stories or the techniques driving value, when the stories and the techniques came about from something other than a cynical ploy essentially to concoct a story or to hype a technique that was literally created for no apparent reason other than so they could hype the technique. What drives me nuts in modern art museums is not when a piece is odd or even simplistic but when the pieces clearly required little to no artistic skill and scream that they are little more, and somethings nothing more, than a simplistic con job. It doesn't help when the labels appear to be written by people throwing darts at a word cloud of art terms to create descriptions that are completely meaningless. Went to the Broad Museum with the wife and found plenty to enjoy, and I could appreciate the stuff I didn't like but which clearly required effort and skill to accomplish. But without exception, every label (the descriptions accompanying the art) was an affront to the English language and made me feel like either 1) the person who wrote it was babbling incoherently in another language and then translated via some outdated language app, or 2) the person who wrote it knew it made no sense whatsoever and was laughing at the pretentious rich idjits who paid them big bucks to write it.

I've seen Rothkos in person and found them even more annoying than in pictures. Because in person it's even more clear there is nothing special about them at all and they are usually accompanied by a museum plaque describing them with word-salad nonsense that conjures the image of a con artist attempting to justify their valuations for stupid rich people.

I heard a story once of a small box full of Actions 1s that were all chewed through the center to form a comfy rat nest, and what remained of the books was so inundated with baby rat waste that the guy who found it gagged from the smell and tossed it all. This was many years ago.

If my math is correct, the ASM 33 went for 42X guide