furthur

I was fortunate when a friend visiting the UK met Boo Cook and told him she had a friend who loved comic art. Boo gifted her a couple of cover preliminary drawings and she then gave them to me when she got home.

Just met and got my first piece from Wayshak at OAX. Talented guy with a great imagination!

here is another prelim that is rarely seen (plenty of Frazetta prelims out there, but ever seen one for Johnny Comet? This one is actually on the back of a Johnny Comet and only after owning it for several years did someone point out to me that it was a preliminary drawing of a figure that appears about two weeks later in the continuity. Hell, I was just happy to get such a fine example of Frazetta's famous signature-art all by itself

Here is a prelim from someone not shown yet. I was pretty astonished at how Tim Sale was able to fully render the covers for the Dark Victory series in these preliminaries, each of which is less than 2x2 in size, but still have all the information you see in the final covers. Of course these are shown the the frame so I apologize in advance for any degradation of the image quality.

I'd like to show a little more discipline and have a lot more fun this year, though I had plenty of fun showing no discipline at all in 2023. I pushed hard into more modern territory and expanded the number of women and non US artists in my collection pretty signficantly. I think I'd like to step back now and hit a few of the more nostalgia oriented things I am still missing, including some underground artists and just a couple of older comic book and comic strip artists-and perhaps some small upgrades where they make sense.

Some of y’all might remember “Frame it Again Sam” temporary frames. He went out of business a while back so I asked my framer here in Atlanta if he could recreate the frames which allow you to swap out art in a backing board and Mylar (or not if you don’t care or only will have the art up a little while) it takes about two minutes to swap out art and they are made to fit 11x17 art with a little room to spare. I love them! Anyone interested can reach out to me at benno119@gmail.com and I’ll see if I can get him to make a few more. Cost about 275.00 but the ability to have a nice looking frame you can swap out quickly is worth it to me

Here’s a nice Gene Colan pencil page from one of my favorite series-Nathaniel Dusk. The art was printed with color right over the pencils without any inks

I have a number of EC pages. Here is one from my favorite EC artist. Jack Davis went on to a long and hugely prolific career in nearly every type of illustration imaginable, but the first flowering of his genius is still a marvel to behold. Many folks want either his horror or humor work, but the war stories are just as well drawn as this example shows

Just figured I would give this a bump and note that Randy Martin and I will be doing a panel on original art collecting this Friday at 4PM. We will also be hosting our annual art show at Dragon Con on Friday and Saturday all day in Artists Alley,. this one focused on unpublished art so there will be lots of things that most folks haven't seen before. Hope to see some of you there!

By the way, feel free to email me about a meetup or show and tell directly. Benno119@gmail.com.

If you want to meet up at Dragon Con there is a very simple way to do it. The Atlanta area comic art collectors are doing our annual art show in artists alley. This year our theme will be Unseen and Unforgotten-which will be unpublished work or work that is old enough to be "forgotten" by anyone except us! There will be some outstanding material there-lots of preliminary work and commissions that are not online and can only be seen at the show. We would be happy to have a meetup at our booth which like in 2019 will be against the escalators in the back of Artists Alley. If that doesnt work, Randy Martin and I are doing a panel on original art collecting and you are welcome to attend and razz us all you want!! If anyone wants to do some show and tell though-now that is my kinda thing. If you are coming to the show and want to have a show and tell meetup and will be bringing things to show off, I will be happy to bring a few things not in the show just for that purpose-just let me know!! Benno

I havent posted much here, though I certainly have more than a few commission pieces. Here is one from 2013 I was very happy to snag

there is a thread about this!

I currently support a few folks on Patreon and have considered a few more. I support Jeremy Bastian, which is pretty clearly the best deal in town in my opinion, having gotten several original pieces that I adore. I also support Adam Hughes, Joshua Stephens(super indy-was local to Atlanta, now in St. Louis) and Rich Tommaso (good friend, great comic artist doing his own anthology book with the support) Others have posted cool stuff from Jeremy-here is one of mine.

I have several one pagers by Rick Geary done for National Lampoon and other magazines