drdroom

Hi Ferran, congratulations and thank you. Your name will be emblazoned on the Source Wall for the service you have done. On the blog it still says to Paypal $55, but should it now be $45?

Glen, you are one of the few people on this thread who has done any actual research, so I don't mean any disrespect, but how do the pressmen know that Stan didn't end up with the covers? Does that mean the covers were sitting around the printing plant, no one from Marvel ever came around for them, and so the "someone else" is the janitor or something?

Those Luke Cage covers were the best Marvel covers of their era, IMHO. I really can't congratulate you enough.

To anyone from the outside world, Frazetta's content is cheesy and ridiculous. However, if they know about drawing, they can see that there's an authentic pulp energy there that is unmatched. Boris lacks that inspired quality entirely, and only ever had the cheese. That's how I saw it as a young fan in the seventies, and my view hasn't changed at all, except for that beautifully perverted Tom-of-Finland looking Daredevil piece, which ranks with that amazing Liefeld Captain America. Boris should go more in that direction. He might even crack the fine art world if he took that a step further.

I went to the link but it said the page was taken down by owner...?

Wrightson is a great example, but any pro inker can do the basics of tonal range. It's line thickness and hatching basically. To Rick2You2's point above, yeah, it's a translation not an exact reproduction.

To address the topic: I think there are three categories of great ink job. Number 1, most often committed by the penciller, perfectly expresses the vibe of the pencils. That is, as close as possible, considering that, as Erik Larson once commented, "ink KILLS pencils." Examples of this category of great inks include John Buscema (and his master, Hal Foster), Neal Adams, Barry Smith, and R. Crumb inking themselves, and Mike Royer inking Kirby. Number 2 are inks that even transcend this standard, inks that outdo the nuance of the pencils, art that truly comes into it's glory as ink laid down on paper. Again, this will almost always be the same artist who did the pencils, but here the greater genius shows itself in the inks: Frazetta, Toth, Booth, Ketcham, Caniff, Godwin, Wrightson, Jeff Jones. Finally, the third kind of great ink job, IMHO, is the ink job that improves on the pencils, or adds another value to the pencils without losing anything they already had. So maybe Wood over Kirby, certainly Wood over Bob Brown. P. Craig Russell did some remarkable work over very minimal, late Ditko pencils. I have an Infantino page with remarkable Nino inks. Wrightson over Adams or Kaluta is nearly as good, yet different, as those artists inking themselves.

OK, so what do you think this page could resell for today?

To me, that's basically an Alcala page. There's very little of John Buscema left. Here's an example of Buscema pencils. Direct and clean, not fussy, not baroque.

Sorry to be late to a party I unwittingly started! I'm not the collector you're thinking of, I'm a medium-time collector, CAF gallery Aaron N. The obvious reason for a penciller to be their own best inker is that the penciller has the best understanding of their own artistic intent and can ink accurately OR continue to develop the work creatively as they ink. In the case of a mediocre artist maybe this doesn't matter, and in that case by all means get Wood or someone to ink it and make it better. But John Buscema was a truly talented penciller, and his own inks best reflect the way the pencils look. Look at his inks on the Conan sketch at bottom right (I didn't search a long time for this example, I know I've seen better ones). Compare the inked arm to the un-inked arm: the inks have as much of the character of the pencils as ink CAN. Yes, the pencils are a bit light and the inks reflect that. I'll take accurate inks over the wispy pencils of the later stuff any day over Alcala's gross over-inking. A note on Kirby: he was absolutely his own best inker prior to about 1960. Then he stopped inking almost entirely, and never really took it up again, so we don't know for certain. Royer is my pick for his best post-1960 inker, and I also like the later Sinnott.

The other big qualifier is "Silver or Bronze"

The maximum value of the piece to the buyer, at the time of purchase, is what the underbidder bid. You, the buyer, were the ONLY person willing to pay what you paid, so that's not really a reasonable basis for setting FMV.

This looks like the perfect moment to post my Heritage win --it's my first Adams piece and I'm so happy:

Romance, shmo-mance. Pencillers are almost always their own best inkers, for obvious reasons, unless they just don't bother to ink. John Buscema is so obviously his own best inker to me that I would have to think you just don't really like Buscema's drawing that much, if you prefer it modified by someone else.

There was also a pretty nice page from Howard the Duck 1 in the same auction. Went for 5K. The AA7 page went for 15.5K.

I also did a double take on this one. Last time I recall something similar was a Mazz Born Again page, but the values of those were a bit less well established at the time.

Ah, you've outsmarted me already...

Not all that interesting of an article to me. It's a way of reviewing the Omnibus Edition of the Fourth World, which I'm sure is not a very congenial way to read the Fourth World. His left-handed-compliment notion that reading comics is "reading irresponsibly" doesn't seem to produce any interesting openings into the text. I did leave a little comment in response to his vague assertion that Lee kept Kirby "on the page" at Marvel.

I thought I tried that, but I guess not! Guesses entered. I resisted the temptation to run up a huge score by only guessing on items no one else had bothered with

Anybody know what the requested format is for the numbers? I've tried multiple times to save my guesses, but I keep getting a "match requested format" message. I've tried with & without dollar sign, with and without decimal. Using Safari, if that means anything.

Early Kirby Human Torch for $2250, just a few days ago. Not bad.

"hand-signed by legendary comic artist Stan Lee" --anybody notice something wrong with that sentence?

I'm almost sure it is this one.

It sounds like the OP values primarily images of covers featuring major Marvel heroes, and signed by Stan, so, as nice as I think that Kamandi page is, it's not likely to outshine these giclees in his eyes. Perhaps someone has a piece of Marvel cover OA in the under-20K range they'd like to post? Doesn't have to be Kirby, just be Avengers or something & with a Stan signature.

High five, Fred!