drdroom

If you want to frame it, you can't afford it. The true baller move would be to stick it to the booth wall with a wad of packing tape.

The Heritage description has let us down as well: "The board has been closely trimmed and there is some handling wear with a few small edge tears, but nothing that will take away from the eye-appeal, once the art has been framed for display (and trust us, you'll want to show this baby off)" ...I mean, I guess it is being shown off. It's just not quite frame-worthy.

I tend to spend. When the real grail shows up, I wheel and deal with the stuff I have. Sometimes that works to my advantage, if I bought low. If I just break even, well, I had the pleasure of the lesser stuff for a while. Sometimes cash now is the only way and I have missed a couple things from lack of instant liquidity. So it goes!

I've had this experience as well. Provided extensive write-up material --doing the work for them, ahead of time--better than what they went with, and nothing. I don't know if HA is any better in this regard though.

This piece was ogled extensively at the end of the July HA auction thread before some genius person took it on themselves to begin this thread. and Wow is right.

Holy Sh*t. That is simply the number 1 Kam splash. It's going to surpass any previous comp.

Is somebody gonna start the Sept Heritage thread already? Or should we just keep going on this one forever?

Have you guys considered that these tracings have a sort of charming innocence? I only ask you to consider, whose dream are you crushing with all this negativity?

I'm a painter/ muralist. My work is abstract, based on collage designs. You guys might spot some familiar elements. www.aaronnoble.net

These are great. What will your book be called?

These are beautiful.

Opinions? https://www.ebay.com/itm/264761539795

Ouch! What page was it?

This is like a Zen koan.

Yeah, turned out Bluechip WASN'T completely wrong! And I guess you were not indulging in wishful thinking either, since you're not attributing really any more pencilling to Jack than I am. My bad!

Not so much how regular comics were produced, but how Jack had always worked plus how artists in general make use of assistants, plus Jack's physical condition at the time. Typically the assistants do the less creative parts, like tracing. A straight recreation like this is basically ALL less creative work, so it makes sense to have the assistants do most of it. I do a fair amount of tracing from projections in my own work and it's pretty tiring for the eyes and requires a degree of steadiness in the hand. That seems like the worst part of the job to give to Jack in his last years. In my scenario, Jack does the only tiny creative bit: a few black spotting marks that are different from the original cover rendering. Jazzing up the blacks would have felt familiar to him as he had done it for years on S&K shop pages, both his own and others. As you say, we are just guessing, and that's my guess.

My theory was never Jack with a marker! It was Assistant with a marker. Now discredited of course. As to my breakdown of labor theory, let me quote from my earlier comment: There is no basic pencilling required to produce this result. It is traced, and then there is a careful process of heavy pencil drawing to emulate lines that were originally done in ink. It would have been elder abuse to make Jack perform any of this tedious work. There are a few variations from the original in the black spotting, like the black dots on Iron Man's hand, so I could see Jack adding some finish touch-up marks, similar to the ink touch ups he used to add to other artists pages in the S&K shop days. So where we differ seems to be that you imagine a light tracing of basic lines by Jack, whereas I believe the piece is intensively traced, in almost every detail, not by Jack. Perhaps someone with Photoshop skills will someday do an overlay with an original cover scan in search of this part of the answer.

I don't think Kirby is even on record, that's just Theakston informing us that Jack didn't like to repeat himself. Unreliable source, but it tracks with comments from better sources, IIRC, to the effect Kirby found the covers a chore because he'd already finished that story and wanted to be doing the next one. Your main point is the one that stops me from writing these off completely though. Jack, from all I know, was an honest man. I don't think it would sit right with him to pass these off as his work without putting his hand to them in some way, but I'm not 100% on that, given that misattribution of credit was an industry standard practice. All kinds of artists produced "Simon & Kirby" pages, back in the day. That didn't make Jack a cheat, that made him a boss! Jack wouldn't want to hurt collectors, but what would he have thought they really cared about? If they were into real artistic creation from Jack's hand they would be clamoring after New Gods pages or Captain Victory or Boy's Ranch or whatever floated their boat. But these recreation collectors, he might reason, are different. The artwork itself isn't the central value. They are looking for something LESS creative: one-of-a-kind souvenir pieces featuring iconic characters, the creator paying homage to his own creation, which has now outgrown him. If Jack supervises it, signs it, takes a picture with it-- well, everybody's happy, he might have figured.

I stand corrected! IF Jack did the tracing, the page could have been impacted with a comparable amount of physical pencil pressure by Jack. Although, if it were lightboxed, as seems likely, then the page might be lacking the "Kirby Seasoning"-- dark smudges on the back from Jacks drawing board. So I have to ding the value 3% for that.

JACK DON'T TRACE. Jack don't ink, & Jack definitely don't fill blacks. Filling blacks is first day assistant stuff, before they are skilled enough to rule borders! My theory was ghost markers, but I defer to Vodou, OhDannyBoy, and a closer examination of the Comiclink scan & accept the piece as all pencil. I wonder if the plan was to have it inked and that didn't happen for some reason?

Personally, I think that is wishful thinking. There is no basic pencilling required to produce this result. It is traced, and then there is a careful process of heavy pencil drawing to emulate lines that were originally done in ink. It would have been elder abuse to make Jack perform any of this tedious work. There are a few variations from the original in the black spotting, like the black dots on Iron Man's hand, so I could see Jack adding some finish touch-up marks, similar to the ink touch ups he used to add to other artists pages in the S&K shop days. Noted that the toy tie-ins were not ghosted. I never thought they were, but it's interesting that somebody did think so. If I'm parsing Mark's comments carefully here, he's acknowledging there are other hands on the commissions and saying nobody was "ghosting"-- in other words, reading literally, nobody ever created original content under Jack's name. The dictionary (Merriam-Webster) definition of ghost is "to write for and in the name of another." The commissions, arguably, don't qualify for that. They are reproductions of old works that Jack indisputably "wrote" himself. We've been calling the assistants "ghosts" but really they were just copiers. Reproducing Jack's work under Jack's supervision. That's not what we're talking about when we note that Sickles ghosted Caniff or Toth ghosted Tufts etc. PS Your point on the unreliability of Theakston is well taken. I'm not giving his testimony any weight in and of itself. RIP

The attribution is a quote from Theakston, and just to be clear, "Kirby" in this context means Kirby's ghost, and these three are distinguished from a larger group done by Kirby's ghost and inked by Ayers. The sense of the article is that Kirby drew none of them. I'm not asserting the truth of this, but that's Theakston's claim, accepted by OhDannyBoy.

I'm thinking the blacks are filled with marker.

That's completely wrong:) Jack pencilling or doing layouts was an act of original creation. He didn't even work with prelims as some artists do, so tracing had no role in his practice. If he traced a copy of the original for this, he did far, far less than he did on a page he laid out (which means also plotted). But also, your scenario sounds unlikely to me. The point of having assistants is not so the main artist can do the scut work. Any fool can trace the picture. Why would Jack trace it?