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Flex Mentallo
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Posts posted by Flex Mentallo
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Ah, Jon Berk, a fellow of infinite taste.
- adamstrange, buttock, Larryw7 and 1 other
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On 1/29/2022 at 1:18 PM, Point Five said:
Interesting! Since CGC gave a pass to the nibbles on otherwise pretty books, it would be kind of fascinating to see how they would handle a big chew.
Perhaps it depends on whether they were chewed by pedigree rats!
- Point Five and Larryw7
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On 1/29/2022 at 5:17 PM, Robot Man said:
Who cares.
Exactly!
I figured on balance it probably isn't.
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I have wondered if this might be a Cosmic Aeroplane, but I'm not about to crack it open to find out! [Surely CGC would have noticed if the interior pages had lots of ticks?] Anyway, here it is for comment.
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On 1/26/2022 at 10:25 PM, buttock said:
I thought the Church Planets had above average, but not ideal, colors as a whole. I was really happy the 5 had above average colors. It's notoriously difficult to find unfaded.
...tragically, neither of them by me. (And last time I checked, I only have two kidneys.)
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On 1/27/2022 at 3:07 AM, MrBedrock said:
Two stunning, stellar otherworldly Planets have been shared in this thread....
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On 1/27/2022 at 6:58 PM, buttock said:
No Michael, all old school collectors would like it. All of them. You're not a true collector. How dare you step out of line.
Well, I was tempted to go green, and say that I'm somewhat jaded by the Mint discussion, but one pines for - well, you get the idea.
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On 1/27/2022 at 4:42 PM, lou_fine said:
Depends, if you are a an old school type of collector, you would downright love the look and the strong colors of the book.
If you are more of the new generation CGC label collector who likes the big number on the top left hand corner of the slab, not so much.
Neither of the above, its not a binary choice,at least for me, and, all due respect, you have no idea what I might be thinking. Planet #38 is one of my very favorite comics. I love the cover, which I find beautiful and strange, and the interior art is some of the best in all of Fiction House. It's also one of the first Planets I ever owned, so it holds a special place for me, regardless. I am endlessly fascinated by the way Fiction House used [or abused] the CMYK model. Thanks to your post, I now find myself thinking more about Green than hitherto, and I'm grateful for this.
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On 1/27/2022 at 12:19 AM, MrBedrock said:
Got to rebuild my street cred around here.
Uh huh, sure, yep, we all believe you. No, really we do, not a shred of doubt.
Kinda reminds me of a very early scene in Broadcast News.
EXT. SCHOOL YARD - DAY Clusters of graduates at the fence bordering the sunken school yard looking down as the tough cap and gowners seen earlier cuff Aaron around. CLOSER IN Aaron feeling from a blow -- his lip bleeding -- his teeth covered with blood...as he gets to his feet. He is livid -- something primal triggered by this brutality. AARON Go ahead, Stephen -- take your last licks. (points at his face) But this will heal -- what I'm going to say to you will scar you forever. Ready? Here it is. He dodges as they come after him. They catch him by the hair and hurl him to the ground. As he gets up he hurls his devastating verbal blow. AARON You'll never make more than nineteen thousand dollars a year. Ha ha ha. They twist his arm and grip him -- his face scraped on the concrete. AARON Okay, take this: You'll never leave South Boston and I'm going to see the whole damn world. You'll never know the pleasure of writing a graceful sentence or having an original thought. Think about it. He's punched in the stomach and sinks to the ground. As the Young Toughs walk off Aaron catches a phrase of their conversation. YOUTH TOUGH Nineteen thousand dollars... Not bad. -
On 1/27/2022 at 12:19 AM, MrBedrock said:
These walked in the door today. Found in a box in a house here in Houston and the older couple who brought them in said they will let us know if any more books show up. Other than a couple in the vgf range they are pretty low grade with tape and such. But apparently low grade is the new sign of a true collector, and I am nothing if not a follower, so I think I will keep them. Got to rebuild my street cred around here.
Cue gazillions of PM's from boardies happy to take those off your hands.
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On 1/27/2022 at 12:47 AM, szav said:
I'm thrilled with how this one looks in hand, but the HA scan does appear to make the color appear a bit deeper. That said, in hand it's radiant, bright, glossy, and fresh in a way that the HA scan doesn't capture. When I hold it up against other comics, even high grade ones you can tell the difference. I don't think my phone pic captures all the qualities either. How my eye sees them is a bit in between the two.
Sparkling!
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On 1/27/2022 at 12:16 AM, lou_fine said:
Have always absolutely loved this cover here because of the stunning green colors that often show up on the higher condition copies, like this raw condition copy right here before it got graded and slabbed:
Although the colors on this copy here definitely looks stronger than on the above CGC 8.0 graded copy, it also looks pretty close to the deeper colors on the CGC 9.8 graded Promise Collection copy.
I'm viridian with envy, if not downright emerald!
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It strikes me that those of you in America waking up to my untimely discourse may perhaps be wondering why I didn't just start another thread 'anyone else over the Sistine restoration?'
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On 1/27/2022 at 8:16 AM, Randall Dowling said:
This is a shocking loss in the before and after. Very tough.
The money for the restoration was supplied by, of all things, a Japanese television station. No one understood why. What was Japanese television getting out of it?
The motivation turned out to be mildly absurd and fully comic. The pope at the time, John Paul II, the Polish pope, was famous for his traveling. Crisscrossing the world in the search for forgotten Catholics, he had ended up in Tokyo at a posh reception hosted by Japanese television. Pressing spiritual flesh, here and there, he happened to mention his hopes for the Sistine ceiling. It had grown too dark and needed restoration but the costs were prohibitive.
In the audience was the man who ran NTV — an adventurous television station that was trying to muscle its way up the broadcasting ladder — and, more importantly, his wife. She came from a family of Japanese Catholics. This is no place to go into the grim persecution of Catholicism in Japan, but the circumstances would certainly harden you and made you determined.The wife began badgering her husband about paying for the restoration. After a few weeks of it he succumbed.
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On 1/27/2022 at 12:20 AM, sfcityduck said:Super complex debate. The restorers decided that Michelangelo used a particular technique in painting the ceiling, that he painted on wet plaster so the paint infused in, and that embellishments added on the dry plaster (additional detail and black highlights) weren't him. So they went beyond just cleaning off the dirt and grime, which is the usual conservative practice, and took an approach that might have been overly aggressive in also removing paint (which may or may not have been original). It's a cautionary tale with the moral that a conservative approach is probably best as you can always clean more, but you can't really add back what you took off. The moral is not "don't clean" as part of conservation, it is clean appropriately.
In 1986, when defending his own restoration, the chief restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci admitted that his professional predecessors’ judgements had been contrary to his own and “not encouraging” to the restoration. That was an understatement. Restorers who had worked on the previous restoration (1935-36) had officially and flatly reported that Michelangelo had “finished off a secco”, that is, that he had painted on top of his frescoes when they had dried.
Restorers who had worked on the previous restoration attempt of 1904 had abandoned attempts to clean the frescoes for fear of damaging Michelangelo’s vulnerable work on the surface. Colalucci, greatly in thrall to contemporary “scientific” analysis, dismissed such official reports as “subjective impressions”. He also ignored the testimony of the British painter and fresco expert Charles Heath Wilson who had reported his own close-hand examination of the ceiling in an 1876 book “Life and Works of Michelangelo Buonarotti”. Wilson had found the frescoes “extensively retouched with size colour…evidently by the hand of Michelangelo”. He found that this secco painting “readily melted on being touched with a wet finger and consisted of a finely ground black, mixed with a size probably made according to the usage of the time from parchment shavings.” He further noted, “The shadows of the draperies have been boldly and solidly retouched with this size color, as well as the shadows on the backgrounds…The hair of the heads and the beards of many of the figures are finished in size color …These retouchings…constituted the finishing process or as Condivi [Michelangelo’s preferred biographer] expresses it, alluding to it in the history of these frescoes, ‘l’ultima mano’ ['the last hand'].”
For Wilson, there could “be no doubt that nearly all of this work is contemporary, and in only one part was there evidence of a later and incompetent hand.” Aside from its artistic force, certainty about the secco painting’s antiquity lay in an elegant technical proof: “The size color has cracked as the plaster has cracked”. It is a matter of record that the ceiling cracked before any restorers touched it. If, as has been claimed, later restorers had repeatedly applied glues, those glues would inevitably have been brushed into the pre-existing cracks. Wilson, who tested the depth of the cracks with a penknife, saw that none had been. Artists like Wilson appreciate that it is impossible to paint over a cracked surface without working the material into the cracks. Wilson was left in no doubt: having been applied when the ceiling was new and not-yet-cracked, these surface glue paints could only have been Michelangelo’s own work, his finishing stages, his l’ultima mano. Normally, restorers recognize that when varnishes or paints can be shown to have run into age-cracked materials this can be taken as a proof of their more recent origins. On this occasion, the restorers failed to recognize the implications of the converse.
- Larryw7, jimbo_7071, jimjum12 and 2 others
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Details of Michelangelo’s Cumaean Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, as seen before and after restoration. Susan Cicconi, eat your heart out!
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On 23 October 2013 the Daily Telegraph reported the outcome of a Chinese Government-approved, £100,000 restoration during which a Qing dynasty temple fresco was entirely obliterated by luridly colorized repainting. This only came to light when a student posted comparative photographs online. In the resulting furor, a government official from the city responsible for the temple described the restoration as “an unauthorised project”. Wang Jinyu, an expert on fresco restoration from the Dunhuang Academy, had said the intervention could not be called “restoration, or [even] destructive restoration” because “[It is] the destruction of cultural relics since the original relics no longer exist”.
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Mind you, its not the greatest botch ever. Behold the man! The fame of the incident led to a great increase of visitors to the parish church in Borja, Spain. The church imposed an entrance charge. The parish priest was arrested for what the Daily Telegraph reports as “suspicion of misappropriating funds [£174,000], of money laundering and sexual abuse”.
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When his painting was originally unveiled in 1512, observers were stunned not by any brilliance of coloring (no one mentioned his coloring) but by the fact that the artist had given such great emphasis to light and shade, and to “sculptural” modelling in between his great tonal contrasts, that his figures appeared real, not painted, and that they seemed to be occupying real space and not merely decorating surfaces. Experts marveled that such were Michelangelo’s powers of design that surfaces on the ceiling that were actually advancing towards the viewer, appeared to recede because of his brilliantly conjured illusion of perspective. This novel and revolutionary development was recognized for nearly five centuries…until the last restoration. There are no historical or artistic grounds for accepting claims that the unexpected restoration changes constitute miraculous “revelations” of original values.
This engraving (of c. 1790) of Michelangelo’s Prophet Daniel shows intense, almost “cinematic” contrasts of light and shade and of very strong shadows that appear to have been cast by the depicted forms and draperies. As such, this image accords perfectly with the responses of Michelangelo’s contemporaries when the ceiling was first painted. It accords with accounts of Michelangelo producing model sculptures of figures that he was painting, in order to study the shadows that would be cast onto the ground or onto adjacent walls.
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Daniel's right hand and knee. On the unrestored fresco, the intense red underpainting shows through the black a secco wash adding luminescence to the shadows. The form under the garment is achieved by the black wash. Hence the wet layer is a form of scaffolding, executed in full knowledge of what remained to be finalized in the secco layer. [And I know from personal experience, that once you've painteda first layer, the memory of how to repeat that is held in the hand, not the conscious mind, so the second layer is more fluent and spontaneous.]
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In the left spandrel, black detailing of robes, eyes and architecture is intact. In the right spandrel, these details have been lost in the cleaning.
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Bubbles Bursting
in Golden Age Comic Books
Posted · Edited by Flex Mentallo
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