Kevn

I thought the name sounded familiar, and just looked at my tattered hand-written spreadsheet of original art purchases and it turns out I bought my first piece of OA from Roger, a George Roussos page from one of the EC sci-fi books. I recall that this was an impulse purchase - what I wanted was a page of Kurtzman Frontline Combat, but those were out of reach, and this was one of the first EC art pages I'd seen being sold individually. The price of the piece was low enough that I went for it, and I remember being put off when it arrived because the blue pencils were some prominent. Haha, what a noob. The good thing about the transaction was it went off flawlessly, and gave me the confidence to buy more art. I quickly started picking up Marvel pages I really liked, and so this piece went to the back of the portfolio and I've never even scanned it. Actually, I'm not even sure I still have it. Anyway, looking back this it was one more instance where I could have used an OA buying opportunity to actually make a connection in the collector community, but I was too shy.

I think you make some great points, but one thing that bothers me about your Wiacek X-Men portrait is that it is 'signed' by both Wiacek and Smith, and the Smith signature is very much in his authentic signing style. Yes, there are dates with the signatures, but to me having the piece apparently signed by someone who didn't touch the page is potentially misleading. I've seen artists sign such pieces with something like "Wiacek '16" and, immediately below write "after Paul Smith '97" without imitating the original artist's signature. An artist's signature is the gold standard for provenance, and imitating it could confuse someone down the road, or be used by an unscrupulous seller.

I've seen a lot of recommendations for https://www.vonhawklabs.com/about-alexandra-vonhawk.html by people whose opinions I respect. I've looked into her services and it appears she is much more focused on conservation rather than restoration. I believe if you send her high quality scans of both sides of the art she can give you a good idea if she can do anything about the fold wrinkles, whether it looks like it would benefit from cleaning, etc. It can't hurt to query her.

Can't imagine it would hurt, and it might help if you somehow had more humidity than expected wherever they're stored. I've had the idea that large vacuum seal storage bags, the kind you use for packing away bulky bedspreads and towels, might be useful for sealing up portfolios in a dry, airtight condition. I can't think of why this would be harmful to OA, and it seems like it could be a useful option. Plus you could wrap the portfolios in a couple of towels, so to a thief it would look like you had a few sealed bags of towels that would have no value.

Curious who did these prelims. I like them a lot, but they look like John Romita rough drawings. Is the "Marie Severin" written on them to indicate that she was to do the finished covers, or were her rough work much more dynamic and balanced than her finished work?

My assumption is that if they were vintage (i.e., part of the original production process) it would read "...logo, masthead text, and cover caption box are original paste-ups affixed to the board." I think the words "high-quality reproduction" indicates pretty clearly they're modern, at least more modern than the art. My question would be, how are they affixed? Edit - Bronty beat me to it.

I agree about the cover. I'm not the biggest Miller fan, but that DD 190 cover is very impressive, and I also was surprised it didn't go higher. Maybe it's because the cover is in layers, and the originals are difficult to display?

I suspect there may be an "original" somewhere, but it'll be a unsightly kludge of multiple stats, white out, and rubber cement, with almost no actual "original art"! And with a value probably 1-2% of the value of what just sold.

No insight beyond what I can deduce from the Heritage scan and the original cover image. It looks like the original art was photostatically reduced by about 30%, with the resulting photostat mounted on a blank 10x15 board and additional bg inked in to add the tip of the surfboard, more building on the left and right, a little more ground at the bottom, and more Medusa hair as needed. A lot of the bg sky was inked black, requiring a simplification of the 'swoosh' lines off the back of the surfboard. The signatures were also whited out and inked over, then title and other stats added. Then the whole thing was photographically reduced the standard amount for printing as a cover. I'm guessing that this was done because if the title and other stats were put on the original 10x15 board (i.e., what was sold in the auction), it would have covered up most of the SS and part of the thing. It simply wouldn't have worked. As for this now not completely matching the published cover, to my eyes, this makes the cover OA more desirable. You get a larger image of what really matters (a great, well rendered action scene!), with no ugly stats and clumsy corrections. And the signatures are revealed. If there had been significant changes to the characters, as is often seen in covers, I might feel differently, but here the figures are identical.

Sorry to be off topic, but I know people here have wide collecting interests. My sister is asking for the best place to sell a collection of rare books, first editions, etc. An elderly neighbor of hers has asked for help liquidating her collection, and my sister doesn't have time or expertise to directly help, and lives in a city with no rare book dealers. I'm guessing Heritage is a reasonable option to at least give a rough appraisal and actually sell any books that really are valuable, but wasn't sure if other auction houses are better for books.

Thanks for sharing your CAF page. It looks to me like you're doing just fine in your collecting - that's a really nice set of pages! I like how you have a theme/preference, and are working it well. I also like that you're focused on panel pages, as I mostly have been. I tend to prefer those for a variety of reasons, especially when the pages are well chosen so they stand alone nicely, as your pages do. One thought is that you can stretch your budget to add artists who have done Batman but who tend to be more expensive, rather than buying more expensive pages by artists you already have. I've tended in the opposite direction, being more artist-driven than character driven, but Batman is a great character for bringing out the best in a variety of artists, no matter their style. Check out the Batman Dark Age book that just came out. I'm a big Allred fan and am enjoying his take.

A basement is the last place I'd put OA (or anything vulnerable to moisture/mold). I've known of several people who had their basements flood (my mother's basement twice flooded to the rafters), and lots of basements are just generally dank. Mold is a much bigger threat to OA than theft. Attics have the opposite problem, poor temperature control and often become ovens in warm weather. I've kept my OA in my house during renovations several times. I have other valuable things and electronics, much of which would be a much bigger target for theft by workers, or would be more vulnerable to damage. I just took reasonable precautions. Unless the renovation involves gutting the house, I would just move the things wanted to protect to a room that wasn't affected by the renovation, and lock it in a closet. A home security camera setup with live feed is also pretty easy and cheap to set up, so you can keep an eye on things during the day while out of the house (during my renovations I was always living in the house). If you're doing something so extensive that you have to move out for a while, then yes, I'd move the art to wherever I was stying in the interim. Also, my family and I have used temp/humidity controlled self storage places for years without issue. I think the key is that when you put stuff in there, don't let it be obvious that it's really valuable stuff, and you check out the crime history at different facilities before you rent. Most storage units are full of stuff with minimal resale value, and are low value/high risk targets for thieves. in the rare cases where units are broken into, my impression is that it's usually because the thieves had insider knowledge of which units to target.

Ultimately you need to figure out what really floats your boat, and act accordingly. What I mean is, what does your gut tell you when you're looking at OA? I think we're all very different in what we want from, and get out of, this hobby/obsession. Are you bringing a comic collector mentality to buying OA? Are you driven by nostalgia for what you were excited by as a kid? Or do you love these pages as unique and magical objects, records of a crazy process to somehow, sometimes, transmogrifies into meaningful entertainment and even a kind of art? For me it's all about the art, and the feeling I get when I look at that specific piece. Only certain artists, and only certain pages from those artists, gives me that tingle and buzz that drives me to purchase. I couldn't care less which artists/titles/characters are hot or popular, I have relatively little 'mimetic desire' and rarely suffer from FOMO. So 'popular' doesn't nudge me. I see lots of art that I can admire, that I can respect, and that I might strongly suspect will appreciate significantly, but I have no desire to own it. Looking back (I started collecting in the '80s), I wish I had been more omnivorous, since I would now have a lot of valuable art that I don't love, but that I could trade for pieces that are now much more expensive than I'm willing to go. But that ship has sailed, and I've still ended up with a bunch of pages that still excite me when I look at them. By all means stretch yourself and try buying a page or two that are more expensive, but I recommend doing that from passion, and not from calculated reason. Buy the pages with action/panels/poses/expressions/linework/composition/whatever that you find thrilling. Then see how you feel a few weeks later, and if you don't have any regrets then rinse and repeat.

Any recommendations for Europe, and the Netherlands specifically?

I think it's typical that when demand > supply, prices increase (which I think has been the case for Sandman art in the recent past). This market 'price signal' is usually followed by an increased supply (assuming an increased supply exists or can be produced, and we know there is always increased supply of OA, tucked away in collections, though for many artists/characters/books this is fairly limited). If the increased supply gluts the market (supply >> demand), prices will decrease. If increased supply roughly meets the increased demand, then price increases will be suppressed, but prices won't necessarily decrease (i.e., the 'market is cleared'). Down the road, if new buyers create increased demand, so that demand again is greater than supply, prices will tick upwards again. You can define all this as 'artificial' but I think it's more a basic free market mechanisms.

It's interesting that most here don't see this as anything special relative to other Kirby/Ditko Spidey/Torch pages. I put a high premium on the beauty of the page itself (i.e., out of any other context), and this I think this is a magnificent page! I love the flow of the panels (esp. panels 2-5), the posing and composition in every single panel is excellent, and there's a magic to Ditko's inks over Kirby that makes for a very appealing Spider-Man. It's all action and it makes me smile to look at, even though I'm sure I've never read this comic. There's also something very modern about the way the page presents. In contrast, when I look at the FF Annual splash page that sold in 2022, I don't see the same appeal. Aside from the typical unsightly stat at the top, I don't find the images of any of the characters particularly strong or appealing, especially Spider-Man. There's no interaction between any of the characters, and it's almost diagrammatic. It's exposition, not action. If I were a single guy with no family concerns like I was in my early days of collecting, this is exactly the kind of page I'd be praying no one would go above $100k because I'd love to have this on my wall.

That's a magnificent page. I'm kind of wondering what you got in the trade - it must have been pretty damned special!

One thing I love about these prelims is that Stelfreeze is making the word balloons an integral part of the page composition. I have an artist friend who worked as an assistant for Jean Giraud, and he told me that Giraud once quizzed him with, "What do you need to start with when you're laying out a comic book page?" After a few wrong guesses, he answered, "You have to know where you're going to place the word balloons, otherwise you have no control over the final page look and composition." After hearing that I realized that this was another reason I loved Giraud's work so much - the word balloons are perfectly integrated and never detract from the images or the flow of the page. Obviously this doesn't work for the Marvel-style workflow of figuring out the dialogue after the pencilling is done, and there are plenty of pages where that works just fine, but for an artist to really be in control of what the finished pages look like, it's a hard concept to beat. I think in general when we look at a comic page the word balloons become somewhat invisible, that our visual system "deprioritizes' them as we're taking in the images, but there are lots of cases where those pesky balloons are crowding or confusing the drawings. And thinking about this made me realize I actually prefer OA where the word balloons are hand-inked on the page. Pasted on word balloons look distracting on the surface of the art, and pages look 'naked' to me when the words are on a physical or digital overlay and not part of the displayed art.

The auction page now shows images of the entire artwork, out to the edges of the sheet. On the right side is written "5 1/2 FEET HIGH BM - MATTE" with arrows indicating just the image area of Spider-Man. At the bottom is written "SHEET SIZE 6' Fig. 5 1/2' - leave 1" all around". With the research done here, I think that pretty much settles it. This is the image that was the basis for the 6' poster. CL seems to have updated the description with: "An interesting note on the right side of the artwork says "5 1/2 FEET HIGH BM-MATTE". This indicates that perhaps in addition to the intention to be published as a Pin-up, this artwork was also intended to be used for the production of a large promotional display with a life-size Spider-Man figure. We are not aware of such a display ever being produced or exactly what it would have been used for in the 1960s." I don't think that was there before. It's odd that they don't also mention what's written in the bottom margin, and that they seem to be unaware of this iconic poster. On a side note, I'm glad that the original listing didn't show the marginalia on the artwork. It's been fun following the excellent sleuthing members here have been doing. And the sellers should be throwing a party (while there may be a well-heeled collector or two who had similar suspicions and were hoping to buy this magnificent piece before it was widely realized that it had, indeed, been published.

Kaluta was the first comic book artist I met (along with Frank Brunner) when I was a teenager and still contemplating trying to be a comic book artist. He was a real gentleman, and I watched him do some commission sketches (which I sadly couldn't afford). At that time Brunner was THE big deal artist of the moment, and he was not a gentleman. I was so cloistered in the comics I read at the time that I stupidly didn't even know who Mike Kaluta was. Ah, youth is wasted on the young. Thanks for starting this thread. Prelims are wonderful as a collector for a few reasons. It's the pure artistic output of that artist, unmitigated by an inker and an art director's fixes/corrections. As you note, you can actually see the artist's process. In the case of this Kaluta prelim, I actually like some of the original choices better, though I can see the logic of many of the changes when he redrew it and inked it. And they're vastly more affordable. One of my favorite prelims is this set of color studies by Steve Rude for The Next Nexus 4. You really get a sense of the process and creative decision making:

Michael Kaluta, The Spectre #2 cover prelim.

But did he gift unpublished art, art that easily could be used as intended, or repurposed in numerous ways? Maybe so, but it certainly seems like a foolish thing to do from a business standpoint, given how popular Ditko was around that time.

Perhaps it was given away out of spite, given how the relationship between Lee and Ditko deteriorated at the end. It didn't directly hurt Ditko necessarily, since he'd likely already have been paid for the piece, and he likely wouldn't have even know what happened. Of course it did deny him the pleasure of seeing it published, and though Stan couldn't have known it at the time, it also denied Ditko the return of the art when Marvel finally started returning art.

I think the free market always sets the price. Artists generally have relatively little control over the prices their work fetches (I know lots of artists and painters, and this is an enduring source of deep frustration). I think what you're getting at is if there is more supply than there is demand, then work will go unsold, and any art that is unremarkable will likely fetch less. But many of these pieces of OA, like the cover in question, are unique and specific. If there is no real equivalent, then the market can't be saturated.

That's complete insanity. Still available on CAF: http://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1058355 Those comments. Normally fans are discreet in their commentary on artist pricing. You've really got to be an outlier to get that kind of reaction. The comments are unsurprising, though I think some of the fears expressed ("Awesome cover! But if you don't want to sell it, don't sell it. $50k is a seriously dangerous number. If every artist out there sees that and starts asking those kinds of prices, it's really going to hurt availability for the fans. Even in the past decade the prices have skyrocketed, but this type of pricing has the ability to really, really hurt the market.") are silly. Pricing doesn't determine the market -- buyers determine the market. No buyer, no effect on the market. I agree that this is probably just a smart way to avoid endless pricing/sales inquires from eager fans. He obviously wants to keep the piece, but he also knows what level of silly offer would change his mind. So how silly is a 50k price? I'm asking because I really don't know. Not a lot of comps to compare it to. But I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this run on Batman is the best received in maybe 10 years or more? I'm not saying this fact alone warrents a 50k price tag necessarily, but I really doubt Capullo would have much problem selling the cover to this first issue for at least 20k, maybe 25. Still a very, very long way from 50k, but since someone here asked how crazy this price was in today's market, this is my 2 cents. Scott Scott, I use the term 'silly' as a playful way to say "unrealistic and unlikely, so he's not expecting he'd get that, but honest about how much the piece is worth to him." I agree that it's probably not an insane number. I see dealers listing prices that seem, well, silly. Some of that is probably a business strategy, waiting for someone to come along for whom that piece is a grail piece, or to give them plenty of room to bargain and still get a high price, but sometimes it seems to be a price arrived at through the emotion of not really wanting to part with the piece, but also knowing what financial price point would change their mind. In other words, maybe Capullo is trying to signal where he wants the market for his work to land, but I think more likely he just doesn't really want to part with the piece, but would if someone were willing to pay 2-3x the going rate for such a page. I have pages in my collection that I feel that way about.