drdroom

Kirby/Kirby by far.

When I saw the topic heading I assumed the question would be more like What artist in your collection has the best ratio of purchase price to current or realized value? For me, that's probably Caniff, due to one particularly good deal (which I have since converted into slower-appreciating Kirby) 

I admire the tenacity of Zhamlau in defending his unpopular (not to say bonkers) Top Five placement of Sal B. The originality of this idea has provoked me to rethink all my assumptions & biases and imagine an alternate reality in which the bland & reliable utility player is held in the highest esteem. Who else would logically be in a Top Five that includes Sal? Here's my tentative Earth-B Top Five, which is open to revision:

Sal Buscema

José Garcia-Lopez

Bob Brown

Al Plastino

Paul Norris

Sal's work on these two covers is so completely unmarked by any sort of interest, originality, or finesse that I wonder if that's not actually an advantage of his work for character-based collectors? Isn't this work sort of the pure distillation of "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way"? –a natural progression in which John B. stripped out the plastic originality of Kirby, and then Sal B. stripped out the figure artistry of John, to arrive at these pure corporate ideograms of the valued superhero characters? In other words, there's almost no artist getting in between you and the idea of "Iron Man" or "Dr Strange."

Link to auction? I'm not finding it.

32 minutes ago, mxs7 said:

I briefly owned this cover back in the 1980s. I sent it back because the seller did not disclose Conan was a paste-up. I do believe there was an original drawing of Conan under the paste-up, however. 

Mike

OA paste-up or stat paste-up?

I think it is most unfortunate that Frank reworked Egyptian Queen. I find the final version sort of uncomplicatedly sexy, where the Warren version has a complex expression of alarm and is only accidentally sexy, which makes her MORE sexy. I fear I will have to spend my 4.2 million elsewhere. Perhaps on a Lichtenstein.

Taking L.B. Jeffries list, which gives proper weight to the foundational strip artists, as a starting point, & making judicious replacements:

1. Winsor McCay

2. George Herriman

3. Roy Crane

4. Carl Barks

5. Alex Raymond

6. Hal Foster

7. Milt Caniff

8. Charles Schulz

9. Will Eisner

10. Jack Kirby

11. Harvey Kurtzman

12. Neal Adams

13. Bernie Krigstein

14. R. Crumb

15. Los Bros Hernandez (I know, this is a cheat, but they really do share an achievement larger than either of them alone)

On 3/7/2019 at 5:53 AM, vodou said:

Basically Lichtenstein was a super-powered Editor-In-Chief

Agree!

This is my all-time favorite Lichtenstein. It's unique in being a direct self-commentary and also in being a perceptive bit of fan commentary --Roy apparently noticed the striking similarities between the X-Men and the Doom Patrol and decided to merge them. Roy copies comics, comics copy each other. Though in fact, it may have been pure coincidence that each company came out with an oddball team led by a man in a wheelchair at virtually the same time.

I'm impressed with the number of votes for Schomberg. I mean, who even owns a Schomberg original? And also, I love his stuff, but it's really just covers, isn't it? He didn't advance the form of comics in any significant way, did he?

16 hours ago, Rick2you2 said:

I'm not sure I am following you, but I think one point is a difference between "fine art" and "sequential art". Sequential art is designed to move a story along, so it is best appreciated in the context of multiple pages with word balloons (oh, I miss those). As a story, there are things going on which are not visible in a snapshot, like secondary story lines, character development, and overall ambience. With fine art, we look at a snapshot, what's there is staring at you, with no next or last page to consult or think about, let alone how the character progresses.

Lichtenstein's work dispels of many of the sequential aspects of the artwork. We know it is part of a story, but he essentially converts a panel in a page to the equivalent of a cover page (which in that sense is similar to fine art on a newstand). Gradations are minimized, subtlety is eliminated, and the artful impact of sequential art becomes the focus of what he does to those panels. That's a reason why Kirby, in my view, is so well liked. His stuff has a lot of impact. Brilliant artists like DeZuniga are not so impactful no matter how good they are as artists.

People like what they like, and it's natural to favor impactful art work. But I remain surprised that the sequential aspect of comic art is not better reflected in the price. A great panel page deserves to be better appreciated. 

I was with you until you called DeZuniga brilliant

But seriously, this point is under-recognized by the Lichty haters. He didn't reference an artwork, the artwork was the whole story. The girl meets the boy, the girl is happy, the girl fights with the boy, the girl is sad, they make up, wedding bells toll in the distance, couple walks into sunset. That's the genius artwork created by some penciller, some inker, some writer, some colorist and some guy at the plant who mis-aligned the red plate. Lichty used a tiny detail of this collective work (for some reason nobody cares about the writer whose word balloon was also referenced). He used like 1/48th of the artwork as reference, and turned that into one complete work of hugely greater impact. How that is not seen as creative is beyond me.

On 2/18/2019 at 10:08 PM, glendgold said:

Sorta. Maybe you know this already, but for those who don't -- the Don Marquis stuff was thought to have disappeared.  In 1950 something, Edward Gorey was leaving work at Doubleday and saw a dumpster in front of the office and on top of the pile was Herriman's art for the Archy & Mehitabal books.  He impulsively grabbed the first three pieces he saw, walked off, realized he should get the rest, then came back and it was gone.  Trash truck had taken the rest.  He told this story starting in the '50s, hoping to find more art, and he never did.  So the assumption was that it was gone.  Apparently not. 

I didn't know that story- so someone else came along and snatched the rest of it! Maybe it was Daphne Du Maurier.

5 hours ago, glendgold said:

When these popped up, I was thrilled because I'm very glad they still exist.  And that's pretty much where it stops for me.  Don't need to own them, but glad they exist. 

It seems like most of Herriman OA has been preserved, no?  KK had a sterling rep amongst the intelligencia in it's own day, perhaps above all other comics, so I'd guess he's always been valued. 

How come nobody is talking about Archy and Mehitabal? Are they in the wrong auction?

20 minutes ago, tth2 said:

All this talk of Pablo Picasso has got the song running through my head.

 

Well some people try to pick up girls
And get called a**holes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and
So Pablo Picasso was never called an a**hole

Well the girls would turn the color of the avacado
when he would drive
Down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an a**hole
Not like you

Alright
Well he was only 5'3"
But girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an a**hole
Not in New York

 

The "not like you" statement in the song always cracked me up.

& also, "Modern Lovers" is an all-time great band name, which practically relates to the thread!

23 minutes ago, vodou said:

We're getting excited over $451? How much is that really over FMV for other Steve Ropers?

At the time I thought it was about 3X value. I would have bid more myself, but like many people, I don't have a watchlist set up for Steve Roper, or Overgard, or even Lichtenstein, so the auction passed me and perhaps many others by. As I recall the listing stated the Lichtenstein connection, which is how Barsalou came across it. I certainly think it would have done better on Heritage, like maybe $750 or so.

15 minutes ago, drdroom said:

I think Citizen Kane is correct actually. The "Stagecoach" of comic book stories would be Toth's "Battle Flag of the Foreign Legion" in Danger Trail 3. 

A page from which sold quite cheaply (IMHO) last year: https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/alex-toth-danger-trail-3-story-page-2-original-art-dc-comics-1950-/a/7158-93241.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515

Link to read "Battle Flag": http://fourcolorshadows.blogspot.com/2012/01/battle-flag-of-foreign-legion-alex-toth.html

IIRC, Krigstein was deeply impressed by this story and always regarded Toth as the artist to beat.

2 hours ago, Taylor G said:

Stagecoach.

I think Citizen Kane is correct actually. The "Stagecoach" of comic book stories would be Toth's "Battle Flag of the Foreign Legion" in Danger Trail 3. 

9 hours ago, glendgold said:

And then Turnip-Man along with the Kidney Lady in the background.  And some duck. 

 

 

 

 

Man, I forgot how dark the Turnip-man arc was! Has he ever encountered Venom?

Truly delightful post, thank you Mike! 

It's interesting to me to see that I'm using the letter grade system wrong, or at least in a small minority usage. As I use it in conversation, 'A' is purely relative to the specific category. Everybody gets to have 'A' pages. The example given above may be an 'A' Arvell Jones Cap page (I wouldn't know). Sure, it's not in the same league as a 'D' Kirby page, but that's not the use-value of the grading system. There's not that much need to compare Arvell Jones with Jack Kirby. What I might need to do is estimate the value of my Arvell page in the market, and the key to that is how it measures up to the other Arvell pages out there. So I grade it A-F on the Arvell curve. If I'm trying to grade it relative to a Kirby-Sinnott FF page, then the alphabet's not long enough for me to locate poor old Arvell's position. 

If we want to consider the most valuable pages hobby-wide, then I go to the 'blue-chip' concept. Killing Joke is blue chip. But then if you need to distinguish between KJ pages, you go to the letter grade, applied purely within KJ.

Agreed, 100% not Ditko.

My understanding is Ditko left a will with very specific instructions. Briefly, he has set up a trust to continue the lease on his Manhattan apartment in perpetuity. His stack of originals is to be placed in the center of the room. The two Dr. Strange stories he never turned in to Marvel when he quit in 1966 are to be placed on top of the stack, and no one is ever to be allowed into the room. 

7 minutes ago, mtlevy1 said:

 

Smith, Barry Windsor
A 100% BWS Conan page or pencil only pages...I know it will not be inexpensive! Frankly interested in almost anything by BWS, especially if it is pretty

 

Hey Mark, I'll have a Conan page from the Elric story, inks are Smith/Sal. I think the best part of it is mostly Smith, but I'd love to have you take a look at it. --Aaron Noble