Taylor G

Items for sale on the Bay.

Closing this thread because I can no longer edit the title. Mods, please delete!

Fans of 1970s B&W horror magazines should run, not walk, to sign up for an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign for the Complete Web of Horror, a hardcover archive of the famous but short-lived magazine. They even have the unpublished stories that were in rights limbo after the magazine perished after three issues! If the campaign is successful (that's still a big if), the book will be published by Fantagraphics. The proceeds of the crowdfunding go to the creators and their estates. The first one hundred copies are signed by the person who put this together.

For those that want to give something back to the hobby, perhaps feeling there should be more to a hobby than pulling out your credit card, one suggestion is to DIY dialogue overlays. One suggestion is to use Adobe Illustrator to cut the word balloons out of a scan of the original page, then paste them onto a mylar overlay (make sure to only use archival tape to attach the overlay). You do not want to just blow up the actual lettering, it will look terrible. If you want to do your own lettering, don't just use Times Modern on your computer. You may be able to find a font for the original letterer out there, or create your own version of their font from samples of their work if you are feeling ambitious. Todd Klein has a series of posts about the history of digital lettering here (search for "digital lettering" on the page). Tom Orzechowski on digital lettering:

One board. One. A lot of young collectors will be familiar with Discord from gaming and may be more comfortable with it. People of a certain age just will not use discussion boards. It's got nothing to do with "cesspools of nepotism" (what does that even mean?). Plus most people access the Internet these days via their phone. A discussion board needs a mobile app to be relevant. And the Facebook app is basically malware.

Chris Snorek and Chuck Arnold have a Discord server. The link for joining that server is this: https://discord.gg/wuaYmpK32Q.

Someone did some digging into the images that were used to train some of the AI image generation software. Looks like there are plentiful examples of copyright and privacy violation. Even if you can get some images removed (using GDPR for privacy, if you live in the EU), what do you do about the software that has already been trained on this data? The artists whose images are most commonly used are......Stan Lee, Alan Moore and Warren Ellis. ETA Fixed the link.

For those that are interested in the art, and not just the nostalgic thrill, a question to ask is, what is the art? Is it the draughtsmanship? I guess people who are satisfied with single pages would say yes. There's an argument though that the real art form is the storytelling, that comics and comic strips developed a visual language that paralleled the visual language of motion pictures, the great popular art form of the twentieth century, and that people who aren't interested in story are missing the point.

Yes, I overstated it. They did real special effects and then introduced extra elements with CGI.

Mad Max: Fury Road was done without CGI because George Miller also hates it. He even wanted to do it without color. Dune shows how CGI can be done well, when you start paying careful attention to sources of light and the light being reflected back (e.g. use of sand screen instead of green screen). No doubt, with Marvel underpaying their CGI suppliers, they will continue to be lowest common denominator, it's what they do. As with any technology, there's room for careful and artistic touches, and room for sloppy rush jobs.

You should be more concerned about the acidification, which the yellowing is just a symptom of, than the yellowing itself. Deacidification can be done by a pro restorer with an alkaline bath, which can also remove some of the discoloration. Bleaching may make it look better, but it can also weaken the cellulose fibers, without addressing the real issue.

E Gerber replaced their board cutting machine with one that doesn't handle big boards, so they don't sell the big boards anymore. Bags Unlimited has 16-1/8" x 23-1/2" mylar sleeves, and 15-5/8" x 23-1/4" "conservation grade" boards. These fit into a 18" x 24" itoya. The biggest twice up art I have is about 15-1/8" x 22-1/8". Every time you take art out or put it in, you run the risk of damage from the flap.

I use 24" x 18" for twice-up. Polyethylene is archival, but not as clear as polyester. Spend the bit extra so you can see the art. If you are really anal, in addition to storing the art in a mylar sleeve, attach the art to an acid-free backing board with archival photo corners. That prevents the corners of the art from being damaged as it moves around in the sleeve, though if you keep all of this in portfolios, they can get heavy. Nice to keep complete stories in books, though. If you are putting art in sleeves with flaps, you are a braver man than me.

No creditor ever closed on a non-paying debtor ever.

Well he wasn't paying taxes owed by the company. At all. The IRS wanted its money, so they forced the company into liquidation.

You don't mention the big one: Marvel Curtis magazines had one objective, to use their distribution muscle to force Warren and Skywald magazines off the newsstands. Why do you think there were so many short-lived horror-themed titles, each of which folded after less than a dozen issues? Al Hewetson would later contend that Skywald still had fans when they folded, the fans just couldn't find the magazines. Warren survived, but never recovered financially (witness for example the heavy reuse of covers in their later years).

CLOSED

SOLD

A foundation has been established to preserve comic art for future generations:

We are definitely in bizarro land when Malthus, the epitome of laissez-faire economics, is being cited as a Socialist. The Irish tenants starved because the British government wouldn't do anything to alleviate their situation. As opposed to the Nazis, who organized the mechanisms of state to exterminate millions of people. Let's stick to Maus, before this thread gets pulled.

I would not equate the Holocaust with Malthusian economics. Malthus simply said population was self-regulating: Too many people, the population gets reduced by mass starvation (He did not consider that new technology could improve the productivity of the land). The Great Famine was a successful Malthusian experiment (though with obvious racial undertones, the Irish were considered subhuman by the British government, and they were still exporting wheat from tenant's payments, even while those tenants were starving because the potato crop had failed). But the British did not set out to exterminate the Irish as a race. They just didn't give a damn. The population of Ireland was 8M before the famine, by the 1950s it was down to 2.5M, today it is still just around 5M. The Nazis set out to exterminate the Jewish race, because they considered that Jewish genes polluted the gene pool. Their inspiration was the way the US cleared Native Americans off their land and into reservations in the 19th century. Hitler expresses his admiration for this in Mein Kampf. As the war progressed, the killing wasn't going fast enough (even the SS soldiers were being traumatized by all the mass shootings), so they turned to industrial methods. Watch the documentary above. They even patented the design of the ovens! An analogue in modern times is the attempted extermination of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda less than thirty years ago. Perhaps the sobering takeaway from that is the part that talk radio played in coordinating the extermination. Presumably today they would be using Facebook (as was done in Myanmar). BTW in that CNN interview with Spiegelman linked earlier, he asks the interviewer what she thinks the Holocaust is. He answers for her: "I think it's a harbinger of what's to come."

P. Craig Russell, although he's been selling some of his Elric art. Because he kept his art, he has self-published (through his rep Wayne Harold) several artists editions. Beautiful stuff.