SOTIcollector

Jeff bought a copy of SOTI from me. He paid very quickly and was a pleasure to do business with.

That is why I buy all the material have the frame shop cut everything, frame, matte and glass and frame it myself. Love that idea! When I get around to framing my Watchmen page, I think that's the way I'll have to go. Thanks for the tip!

Here's the advice I recently gave to somebody who asked me a simliar question. 1) Buy what you like. For any potential purchase, ask yourself, "if the bottom of the market fell out tomorrow, wiping out any monetary value the art has, would I still be happy that I bought this art?". If the answer is yes, it's a good piece to buy. If it's no, keep waiting for the right piece. 2). Published original comic book art is nearly impossible to fake well. Sketches can be faked with relative ease. Let that inform your purchasing decisions. Personally, I rarely ever buy sketches. 3). Invest in some Mylars for art. They are not cheap, but they are essential if you plan on keeping your art for a long time. 4). Be very careful when having art framed. I paid that I thought was a reputable framer to frame my Bolland Animal Man cover, and I found out years later (after the framer was out of business) that they had glued the cover down to foam core board! 5) Read the "New to OA Collecting" thread on the boards, which has good advice. Always get plenty of advice, which gives you lots of informed opinions from others who have been there. Then choose which advice is right for you. After a while, you'll have enough experience under your belt that you'll be able to offer advice as well.

My advice would be more like "Always Go by the Golden Rule of Collecting". That Golden Rule, as you've heard from others, is "buy what you like". I respectfully disagree that the "go for the gold" approach to buying art is the right approach for everybody. For some people, this might be the way to go. For investment, this is good advice. But this approach is not the right approach for every collector and it's certainly not for me. Telling a collector to "only buy the really nice ones" is like telling a comic book collector to "only buy first appearances and keys, and only buy 9.8 or better." For some collectors, that approach works. Other collectors might prefer an entire run in 9.2 (or 3.0) to owning just a single book in 9.8. It's all a matter of collector preference. If everybody just went "for the gold", then Amazing Spider-man #2 in 8.5 would be selling for a quarter. I decided in the mid-1990's that I wanted to own a piece from each of my favorite artists and characters. I bought what I could afford: I got a Starlin Captain Marvel page, a Smith Conan, an Adams GL/GA, a Watchmen page, etc. The pages I got were okay, but not prime examples. Sure, I would have loved a NICER Starlin CM, a nicer Adams GL/GA, and a nicer Smith Conan. Rather than buy all of the pieces I did, I could have held off and bought a single nice splash. However, if I had held out for only nicer pieces, my collection would be much smaller and I never would have acquired one of each of my favorites. Now my collection is complete. I don't buy original art any more becasue I accomplished my mission and I'm happy with what I have. It is important to recognize that the really nice peices, with iconic images from top-name artists, are always more liquid that the lower-tier, less-expensive pieces. When somebody is buying solely for investment, "go for the gold" can be good advice (but still not the right advice for everybody in all situations). However, if a collector is following what I call the Golden Rule of Collecting, then future liquidity should not be as big a consideration as other factors.

My positive feedback has been building on eBay since way back in the days when nobody head heard of them (they gave me a t-shirt at SDCC back in the 90's, when they were trying to get going). You'll find me there as MyComicArt.com (my user ID and my website). Here's my very own feedback thread for the boards.

I'm thinking that perhaps the visitors to this thread may appreciate a neat piece of original art I picked up a while back. It's not The Crow... it predates The Crow by quite a bit. Although I've always wanted a Crow page and never found one that had the right combination of eye appeal and affordability for me, I did manage to acquire a couple really early O'Barr submission pieces. I picked up this piece along with another one, which O'Barr had sent to California Comics in the 70's, hoping to be hired as a comic book artist. Back in the 90's I was lucky to have found this piece, along with a companion piece and O'Barr's original handwritten letter and postmarked envelope from the submission.

In the Senate report, the acting head of the Bureau of Prisons provides the following cases in which he feels comic books or movies can be cited as inciting crimes. It's unclear to me why the respondent included a crime blamed on a movie as the last response, since the Senators specifically asked for comic-book-incited crimes:

My grandmother used to say, "figures lie and liars figure." Was there evidence that crime was on the rise? Yes. Was there evidence that crime was declining? Yes. The Senate's 1950 report on Juvenile Delinquency is a good place to start when looking for an answer to this question, The report is full of responses that had been solicited from all sorts of public officials around the country. The Senators asked these (very leading) questions of the officials: 1) Has juvenile delinquency increased in the years 1945 to 1950? If you can support this with specific statistics, please do so. 2) To what do you attribute this increase if you have stated there was an increase. 3) Was there an increase in juvenile delinquency after World War I? 4) In recent years have juveniles tended to commit more violent crimes, such as assault, rape, murder, and gang activities? 5) Do you believe that there is any relationship between reading crime comic books and juvenile delinquency? 6) Please specifically give statistics and, if possible, state specific cases of juvenile crime which you believe can be traced to reading crime comic books. 7) Do you believe that juvenile delinquency would decrease if crime comic books were not readily available to children? The letter from the Committee was dated August 8, 1950, and responses were expected by August 22, 1950, so I expect many agencies had to scramble (in the pre-computer era) to obtain data for their responses. Despite the fact that the questions were obviously worded so as to elicit a response of "juvenile crime is increasing, and comic books are the cause," the responses can hardly be tallied as overwhelming evidence of an increased crime rate or of the dangers of comic books. In response to this questionnaire, here are selections from just the first few responses in the report: From J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, "Arrests of youths have generally leveled off during the postwar period (1945-49) although the incidence of crime among young people is still abnormally high." He does not state what is meant by "abnormally high," and his statistics don't seem to back up this statement. He goes on to cite specific increases and decreases, and then states, "it should be noted that arrests of boys and girls under 21 in 1949 were 3 percent higher than in 1945." Up 3%. Yup, that sounds like an increase to me. However, Hoover does not state that his figures are per capita, and provides a chart that is clearly absolute arrests and not per capita arrests. Looking at census bureau figures for those years (http://www.npg.org/facts/us_historical_pops.htm) it appears to me that the population grew by about 8% from 1945 to 1949. So in reality, this would be a per capita DEcrease in crime. Hoover goes on to state that "The basic cause of the high rate of juvenile crime is the lack of a sense of moral resonsibility among youth." Next we have a letter from A.H. Conner, Acting Director, Federal Bureau of Prisons, "Dispositions of juvenile cases by Federal courts rose steadly beteen the years ending June 30, 1941 and June 30, 1946, but since that date have declined year by year through the fiscal year ending June 30, 1949. An upward trend was noted in the fiscal year 1950 but the significance of this development is not clear." When you look at the chart of supporting evidence, you see 3,411 cases in 1945 versus 1,999 in 1950, so overall it's a significant decrease during the years in question. Harold R. Muntz, Chief Probation Officer, Hamilton County, Ohio indicated an increase in delinquency complaints for 1948 and 1949 (the 1950 data were incomplete). From 1945 to 1949, the number of delinquency complaints went from 3,491 to 3,679, which is an increase. Muntz attempts to provide per capita data, but uses the 1940 census data in all years, making the per capita data rather useless because it doesn't take into account any postwar population increase. From the commissioner of the North Carolina Board of Public Welfare, "There is no indication that juvenile delinquency has increased during the last 5 years." Okay, I'm not going to sum up the entire report. That's just the first few responses the Senators list in the report. Suffice it to say that some evidence pointed to an increase in juvenile crime, some pointed to a decrease, and some was inconclusive. Much of the anti-comics hysteria was driven by emotional reactions to specific events (e.g. man murders his wife after reading Crime Does Not Pay, kid dies after wrapping a towel around his neck and jumps of a building in an attempt to fly like Superman, and so on). Not unlike the later Manson/Columbine episode, people would have emotional reactions to horrible things they read or heard about, and they would want to "do something" to keep the horrible thing from happening again.

Although Sterling North wrote about the "dangers" of comic books in 1940, the push to ban or change the content of comic books really started to swell in 1948. That was the year that Dr. Wertham's anti-comics campaign gained nationwide attention. He wrote an article in Saturday Review of Literature and was widely quoted in another article in Collier's titled, "Horror in the Nursery." From 1948 until the Senate hearings in 1954, anti-comics sentiment grew. Discussions popped up among parent's groups and religious groups. Municipalities like Detroit and Los Angeles discussed banning certain comics. The New York Legislature and the U.S. Senate started investigating, and so on. As for the cultural context, of course there's no easy answer. In my opinion, you're right on both counts: a percieved increase in crime and apprehension about teen culture both contributed to the anti-comics sentiment. After WWII, a lot of things changed. The emergence of "teens" as a market and a social force, the growth in the number of women who worked outside the home, the increasing role mass media played in people's lives, the leisure time available to kids in economic boom years, and the perception (whether real or imagined) that violent crime was on the increase all led to a fertile climate for those social watchdogs who wanted to keep everything as it had been back in the "good old days." There's some excellent reading out there on the subject. You might want to start with David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague and Bradford W. Wright's Comic Book Nation- The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.

Great thread!!! I believe the Committee actually got a lot of its material from Wertham, who has been criticizing comics publicly since 1948. Something struck me funny about that photo of a newsstand that was included in the NY Legislature document. Why are there multiple issues of the same series displayed? I thought under the old distribution system, an old issue would be removed when a new one came in. Anybody have any suggestions as to how the distribution system would have allowed multiple issues from the same series at one time? Did they simply remove outdated ones based on a sale date that was, say X months past? Then all fo this got me wondering if this photo were doctored. So I decided to see what I could learn by identifying the books in the photo. Here's what I came up with... Almost all of the books seem to be from late 1948. There's nothing in this photo to indicate to me that it was staged, with the possible exception of an issue of "True Comics" that seems to be hidden behind another more "objectionable" comic. Any of you comic book detectives out there want to take a stab at identifying the other comics, or critique my ability to identify them? Column #1 Human Torch (probably #32, September 1948) Crime Does Not Pay Guns Against Gangsters #1 (Sept-Oct, 1948) Guns Against Gangsters #1 (Sept-Oct, 1948) Target Comics v9#7 (September, 1948) Crime Does Not Pay True Crime v1#2 (no date in its indicia. I'm guessing it's May-June-ish 1948 and that 1947 estimates for this book are a bit early. This comic was included in Dr. Wertham's May, 1948 anti-comics article in the Saturday Review of Literature. The same article had an illustration from Jo-Jo #15, also dated May, 1948) Desperado #1 (June-July, 1948) Column #2: Criminals On the Run v4#2 (September, 1948) Witness #1 (Sept, 1948) Wanted #15 (Sept, 1948) Lawbreakers Always Lose #4 (October, 1948) Criminals on the Run Desperado #2 (August, 1948) Famous Crimes Pay-off #1 (July-August, 1948) Hmmm... It looks like there's another book behind Pay-off that's a bit larger. Another issue of True Comics perhaps? Column #3: Crime & Punishment Crime & Punishment Target Comics v9#8 (October, 1948) Complete Mystery #1 (August, 1948) Human Torch (Probably #33, November, 1948) All-True Crime Cases #29 (Sept., 1948) or #30 (Oct., 1948) What is that behind this comic? It looks to me a little larger than the other books, and its logo ends in a block "E". It looks to me like True Comics #79, October, 1949) True Crime v1#3 (July-August, 1948) Murder, Incorporated #2 (March, 1948... this is odd, since May, July, and September issues should probably have been out already)