drdroom

12 hours ago, glendgold said:

Yeah, at least cut up some twigs and duct tape them together in a reasonable rectangle. Save the actual frame for your Sal Buscema art.

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.

3 hours ago, glendgold said:

You think the owner could spring for, I dunno, a 4mm mylar rather than whatever drycleaner baggie it's in. 

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.

1 hour ago, grapeape said:

Comic-Link puts virtually no effort into their write ups (descriptions).
Lazy Bones.

You are not the only one to feel the need to insist on providing them pertinent information to enhance the attractiveness of the art  for auction. 

The first board member to tell me “the art should sell itself” is missing the point. Good descriptions with the art help create additional enthusiasm. 
 

Auctions should end when the optimum number of interested parties can be available. 

 

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.

1 hour ago, Norinn Radd said:

Wow!

https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/lee-elias-chamber-of-chills-19-cover-original-art-harvey-1953-/p/7234-112001.s?ic4=ListView-Thumbnail-071515

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.

On 8/1/2020 at 9:53 PM, batman_fan said:

This one really caught my eye.  I have been wanting a nice Kirby Kamandi splash for a while and I haven't seen a Kamandi splash come up for a while.  Anyone have a thought on where it might land?

 

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

On 7/24/2020 at 11:42 AM, Twanj said:

Twice up Kirbys...usually fly under the radar

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?

On 7/15/2020 at 1:10 PM, NC101 said:

I'm a photographer and working on what will hopefully be my first book, these are a few of the pictures

These are great. What will your book be called?

On 7/15/2020 at 9:37 AM, Andahaion said:

I've mentioned before that I paint landscapes in the Tonalist tradition.  Started as a hobby and now getting more serious over the last year or so.  To that point, an online exhibition (thanks COVID) titled "2020 Best in Tonalism" just opened today put on by the American Tonalist Society.  Feel free to check it out if you like that sort of thing.  I've also included my two pieces juried into the exhibition.  Oh yeah, and I like comics and stuff.  

https://www.bestintonalism.com/

 

These are beautiful. 

Opinions?

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

On 5/27/2020 at 6:33 AM, rrichards said:

The dumbest thing I ever did was with my first silver age Kirby piece.It had all of these notes penciled around the boarders and since they were not effecting the art I ERASED THEM ! (a little history gone )

Ouch! What page was it?

1 hour ago, bluechip said:

It'd be like...

Seller: "20k?  That's what I paid for it and if I can only get 20K I'll just hang onto it."   

Buyer:  "But it's only worth 20K, not a penny more.   And when I sell it I'm gonna have to sell it for 20K..."

 

 

This is like a Zen koan.

3 hours ago, The Voord said:

And my guess was that Jack laid down some basic outlines and said to his assistant, "Over to you", which is pretty much akin to those times he did layouts for other artists to follow.  You idea is that Jack added some finishing touches.  We're not exactly poles apart as I do think Jack's involvement was minimal. I don't have a problem in the world with you having a different opinion, it's just that earlier on in this thread you were too heavy-handed in your dismissal of contrary opinions to your own.  For example, your exchanges with Bluechip guy which he called you out on.   You can respectfully disagree over opinions, which is not quite the same as telling the other person, "You're completely wrong." 

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!

7 minutes ago, The Voord said:

No-one was making Jack do all the tedious work; these recreations were performed voluntarily to earn some money for his family at a time when the days of churning-out several books' worth of art per month were well behind him.

Like I said earlier in this thread, it's all guess work as to who did what.  Unless you were present in the same room, it can be nothing else.  Yes, I know you're trying to extrapolate a possible scenario based on how work for regular comics was produced . . . but this is away from the industry.  You only have to look at the lousy lettering on these cover recreations to realise that Jack wasn't using a professional letterer.

 

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.

6 hours ago, The Voord said:

No doubt all very true until the idea of these recreations came along at a time when, "Jack don't do regular comics anymore".

Recreating something, as opposed to creating from scratch, comes with its own set of problems and would, I imagine, involve light-boxing to get the pencil lines where they need to be.  Or do you think these covers were all done freehand away from such devices?  I don't, which is why I suggested some tracing of basic lines. Please feel free to provide your own thoughts as to how you would attribute the breakdown of labour on these cover recreations.

Glad to see you now acknowledging the cover to be all pencils, as per my original contention.  At least that eliminates your theory of Jack and his magic marker pen.

Heck, everyone knows that , "Jack don't do marker pens."   

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.

4 minutes ago, bluechip said:

The suggestion that the family put one over on collectors is a bold one (though I can see the logical behind it).   I can even see the logic behind the idea that Kirby might have been unable to do the work and agreed to "do" the recreations so his family would get some money before he passed.   But why, oh WHY, does the person quoted in this article then take it a giant leap further and say that we should presume Kirby didn't touch these because he'd been on record as saying he didn't like to ink or do recreations because it meant he was doing the work "twice"?  

The simple fact that Kirby formally and contractually agreed to provide those recreations completely undercuts that particular assertion for questioning their value.   Yet it's pretty front and center here.   And any time someone uses a false assertion, you can -- and should -- question the agenda behind the other assertions that support his conclusion.  

 

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. 

2 minutes ago, bluechip said:

If you believe the "scenario" I posited is untrue, that's fine.  Because that's your opinion and if it's based on logical assessment, even better.

If you say I am wrong about that (even though I didn't say I knew that "scenario" to be a fact). that is fine, as well  

But when you say I am "completely wrong" that the tracing would be an equal amount of actual work on the page as exists on other pieces by Kirby, you are conflating opinions with facts.

Your opinion is that it's not his work if it's not an "original...creation" but that is not how "work" is defined.   If it were, we'd never say that ANY recreation was an artists' actual work.

What I said is that IF Kirby traced his own work, it means there may well be as much of his actual hand on that piece as there is on another piece on which he did layouts (especially if those layouts were then erased).    

It doesn't change that because, as you say, the "layouts (were) an act of original creation".   

Your opinion (or anyone's opinion) of them as a lesser work of creation or being of lesser value is not the issue I was addressing. 

 

 

  

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.

3 hours ago, The Voord said:

'Basic pencilling' . . . in the sense of Jack making a minimal contribution (if Kirby's family is selling a 'Jack Kirby' recreation, I guess it needs to have some Kirby involvement).  My idea on that one (if Jack was using an assistant to do all the 'tedious' work) was along the lines of, "Here, Jack, you trace some basic layouts and I'll take care of all the detail."  It's all guess work, no-one knows for sure.

Maybe Jack's involvement was the marker pen you suggested he was using a while back to fill in all the black areas?  

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?

1 hour ago, The Voord said:

The link I provided for Danny boy's article is just there for additional reading, so make of it what you want.  All things considered, my own belief is that Kirby did some of the basic pencilling, with an assistant tightening things up.  I think it's a bit of a stretch to suggest (at that point in time) Jack was up to successfully replicating earlier drawings on his own.

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.

58 minutes ago, RICKYBOBBY said:

Actually - according to Mark Evanier - no one ever ghosted Kirby. He had people “help” him finish commissions when his health was ailing.

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/jack-kirby-stan-lee-idea-spider-man/
 

He was asked about rumors regarding Kirby's work on the 1980s toy tie-in Super Powers books from DC — was some of the art ghosted (i.e. done by other uncredited artists in Kirby's style)?

"That rumour is not true," Evanier responded, saying that later on when he was ailing, Kirby had people who "helped him out a little on commissions — Jack actually had less assistants than anybody else who produced that much work — but nobody was ghosting for him."

I used to own the JiM 83 which was inked by Ayers. Nothing wrong with the pieces but they are to “mechanical”. Take the FF 72 recreation for example which was commissioned by Glen Danzig which is 100% Kirby. They look similar to the Sotheby’s recreations but they still have that same feeling of “it’s just a copy”. 

https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=509871

RB

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

3 hours ago, The Voord said:

https://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2011/10/original-art-stories-mystery-of-jack.html

TOS 39 is listed alongside AF # 15 and ASM # 1 as being Kirby only.

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.

1 minute ago, The Voord said:

Maybe it's just me that thinks it's pencils.  Description lists Jack as the sole artist.  I do know he did a pencils-only version of AF # 15, while other recreations had Richard Ayers doing inks (joint-signature on the art).

Looking at the image, the areas of solid black look like pencil shading to me.  A larger scan would reveal more.

I think it's pencils only , but I could be wrong . . . 

 

I'm thinking the blacks are filled with marker.

2 hours ago, bluechip said:

the vast majority of Kirby pencil art out there has inks by someone else over it and most of the original pencils were erased.   Many pieces simply had layouts.  So, even if all Jack did with this was to trace or lightbox or copy the basic shapes, he did as much as, if not more than, he had done on many other pieces that are considered Kirby works 

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?