Taylor G

COMIC & ILLUSTRATION ART AUCTION 2016 Frazetta Corben Kaluta Ditko Barry Windsor-Smith

RICHARD CORBEN: MURKY WORLD Limited Exclusive SIGNED (Delirium) NEW FRENCH

EC COVERS PORTFOLIO: ARTISTS EDITION (IDW, 2013) Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta

THE ART OF JOE JUSKO (Desperado) HC Hardcover NEW SEALED

LES CAHIERS DE LA BD Hors Série n°1 BATMAN 2018 Bande Dessinée HC NEW FRENCH

WALT SIMONSON, Manhunter Artists Edition Limited SKETCH #1/50 (IDW) NEW

ROY KRENKEL, Burroughs Artist Portfolio (Jewel of Opar Press, 1979) Frazetta

P. CRAIG RUSSELL, The Selfish Giant Fine Art Edition Limited With Sketch #1/50

MOEBIUS LIBRARY: THE ART OF EDENA (Dark Horse) Moebius Jean Giraud HC NEW!

THE INCAL DELUXE BLACK AND WHITE (Jodorowsky and Moebius) HC NEW SEALED!

Web archived version.

I don't understand all the sturm und drang about a breach at CL.  Have people already forgotten that HA was the victim of a ransomware attack in 2019, or that a live comic art auction after they resumed operation froze up for a while (perhaps while payment was made in Bitcoin?).  This is the company that turns a check payment into an ACH transfer, and in this country, the banks have made it absurdly easy for someone to empty out your bank account if they have your account number (better that than the banks have to invest in the kind of checks and balances that banks in the rest of the world are required to have).

On 8/5/2023 at 4:34 PM, Dr. Balls said:

I'd also recommend LifeLock

Lifelock is a scam.  You're paying someone to sell your personal information to third parties.  Credit Karma provides the same service for free, you just have to live with their constant solicitations.

People should reserve their ire for the credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, Transunion), who keep track of all your credit information and have seen major hacks, hundred of millions of records stolen.  That means all the information needed to open credit cards or apply for loans in your name has already been stolen from these companies with their brain-dead 1960s IT systems.  The only way to protect yourself is to freeze your credit file at all three of these companies, as has been said.

SOLD

That's a picture of Yannick Chastang, the restorer blowing the whistle on the shenanigans, using an X-ray fluorescence device to examine a desk for restoration.  Think of it as looking for evidence of bleach.

Hmm, this sounds familiar.

Dealers accused of tricks that turn ordinary desks into £1m antiques

Quote

 

Yannick Chastang, former furniture conservator of the Wallace Collection, which boasts one of the world’s finest furniture holdings, can no longer turn a blind eye to what some dealers and restorers are doing.

He told the Observer: “I’m being quite generous in saying ‘over-restored’. I would say ‘manufactured’, if I was a bit more blunt.”

He recalled a 19th-century desk that was auctioned for around £2,500, only to surface six months later as an 18th-century desk with a price tag exceeding a million pounds.

He was shocked to discover that a leading antiques dealer had turned it into an object supposedly created by one of France’s most-prized cabinetmakers, André-Charles Boulle, revered by Louis XIV of France as “the most skilled craftsman in his profession”: “I’ve got the photos before and after.

“Very cleverly, they had added bronze and marquetry to make it look more convincing and more desirable. The original did not have those details. That is, unfortunately, a common practice.

“The catalogue entry was how the bronze compared well with objects in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and the Wallace Collection. Of course it compared well, because the restorer copied them.”

 

On 3/19/2023 at 1:01 PM, OtherEric said:

And let us not forget the other cover using a different rendering of the image:

In this case, the image is taken from the Maroto panel from the Dax story that inspired the Sanjulian painting.

On 3/18/2023 at 9:07 AM, KirbyCollector said:

The art was not in portfolios, mind you, but simply stacked in a giant pile from floor to ceiling.

The problem I see is access.  I'm sure there is plenty of art that has sat in piles like that for literally decades.  What's the point?  It's not gold bullion.  Isn't art supposed to be looked at?  At least a lot of Walt's art is now available in artists editions, no longer mouldering in a closet.

P Craig Russell has tried to keep his own art.  There is a story of him at Flo's desk the Marvel office back in the day when he saw the art for one of his stories on her desk.  This was when the policy was to return some art to the artist and some to the writer.  So Craig took the art, removed all the dialogue balloons, and left them with a note for the writer, This is what you contributed to the story.

On 2/16/2023 at 7:17 PM, Axe Elf said:

It's kind of sad and yet somehow appropriate that the first EERIE Fan Fare would feature an obituary--that of Rocco Mastroserio. 

I think he's mostly known for inking Ditko on Captain Atom.  Only 40 when he died of a heart attack, very sad.  Carpe diem.

It's an excellent reference, but I question if it makes the Companion obsolete.  The latter includes interviews with several Warren alumni (including Warren himself).  Companion's bibliography has some of the same errors as Richard Arndt's book, which makes me wonder if they took their bibliography from him (It was floating around the internet for a few years before he published it).  Arndt's book is also a good complement to the Companion, because it covers all of the B&W horror magazine field, including Marvel and Skywald.  

On 12/18/2022 at 1:15 AM, OtherEric said:

there's always going to be the group that feels the Goodwin-edited, EC-inspired run that just ended is the greatest era the title ever had.  Heck, I'm probably a part of that group.  But I think that view is heavily weighed towards the EC fans, who are a large and vocal group but are not a majority of the fans.

The problem with this era is that they were doing 1950s horror comics in the mid to late 1960s.  Sure it has Ditko's best work (yes, Virginia, better than Spiderman), and great work by Torres, Toth, Crandall and Williamson (and some great early work by Adams), but it had clearly run out of steam by the end of that decade.  They limped along publishing stories they had earlier rejected, until Vampirella turned things around for them.

For some of us, the 1970s were Warren's best era.  Not just the Spanish artists like Sanjulian, Enrich, Gonzalez, Maroto, Garcia Mozos and Torrents, but also the best work by newcomers Corben and Wrightson.  That period takes off when Goodwin comes back as editor, also writing early Vampirella stories.  Look up lists of people's favorite Warren stories, most of them will come from this later period.  Even 1984/1994, otherwise an embarrassment of juvenile porn, has some of the best work by Nino and Nebres.  And unlike EC, Warren didn't bury the art in long discursive descriptions like Feldstein did.

Say, is this thread going to cover 1984/1994?  

On 12/4/2022 at 1:36 PM, Bronty said:

It’s already preserved, well enough, in the printed matter.  

Completely wrong.  If you look at the Marvel Masterworks program for reprinting all the classic Marvel work, the worst form of reproduction is based on scans of the printed work.  A large part of the reproduction involves restorers redrawing the original lifework.  In many cases, that Kirby linework you're looking at is actually Mike Kelleher's redrawing of his linework. If you've got the original films that were used for printing (that can be a big if), then that can help a lot, but you're still relying on cr*ppy printing technology from years ago, and on the quality of the films.  Just look at Marvel's reprinting of their B&W magazine content.  

The best example of reprinting of classic content are the slipcased EC archives from Russ Cochran, all shot from the original art.  Compare that with the garbage reprinting of golden age horror from PS Publishing, where they just scanned the comics.  As another example, look at the sad Absolute George Perez Wonder Woman that was published just before he died, with all the deficiencies in the printed work made obvious when it was blown up to absolute size.

On 12/2/2022 at 8:36 AM, barneythecantankerous said:

Couldn't you make the argument that collectors buying up an entire issue is greedy?

It depends on what you want to believe.  If you believe that the art form is all about the story, and whole stories are the gold standard of collecting, then collecting whole stories is all about preserving the art form.  For example, although they get lots of bad press here, kudos to Los Bros for not breaking up Master Race and selling it page by page, and now it looks like it will end up in a museum where it belongs.  Meanwhile the rest of us have the artists edition if we want to look at the art (Again, kudos to Los Bros for sharing it that way).

But plenty of people don't agree with this perspective and it's a free country.  As Upton Sinclair might have said, It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his OA collecting depends on his not understanding it.  On the other hand, an argument that people who collect entire stories, who may feel that they are trying to preserve the art form, are being greedy does seem to be a progression from denial into entitlement.

I do not believe that the Jusko paintings being discussed are part of a shared narrative structure, but it's not really my area.  I guess a distinction could be drawn between a BSD who is a Jusko masterworks completist who wants to own the complete set, versus a dealer or collection of dealers who want to corner the market and set their own floor on the price.  Is the latter "greedy" or just SOP in this hobby?