Taylor G

I came across this 1999 book a little while ago. The nineties .

4 hours ago, comicinkking.com said:

Time will tell, but I think of comics as an art form like jazz, film, or great novels.  Instead of pointing to things that fell out of favor (like Alger), why not focus on the things that have had lasting cultural significance?  Shakespeare, Mozart, Van Gogh....   

A hundred years from now, I expect that motion pictures will be regarded as one of the great art forms of the twentieth century, films like The Searchers, Citizen Kane and Vertigo will be regarded as great works of art, films that tell stories of the human condition, and people like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock will be regarded as some of the great artists of the last century.

How much of comic book storytelling rises to that level?  Maybe O. Henry is a better literary analogy than Horatio Alger, it doesn't have to be great literature, but some of it can rise to the level of memorable short stories.  Another analogy is with film noir: No one is comparing this with great literature, these films were made for cheap thrills, but there's an aesthetic to them that has influenced film makers down to the present day, there will be some that will be regarded as significant works of art (Double Indemnity?  Chinatown?), and meanwhile noir will hopefully always have its "cult" audience that sees to it that we don't lose these films to neglect.

On 2/12/2021 at 5:14 PM, MyNameIsLegion said:

I've never seen this book????? I thought I'd seen just about all the Warren mags.  What's this one have? Any good?

It collected some stories from Warren's 1984 magazine, written by Jim Stenstrum.

After he decamped to Hollywood, he kept working on it and produced some sequels, maybe an animated TV show.

On 2/12/2021 at 4:42 PM, chevalmeow said:

Frankenstein's head has always distracted me on this issue.  It looks like he has a baby head to me. 

I assume that's Rich Corben's Child.

It was a very stupid issue, a "cross-over" with lots of characters from Eerie series, including plenty that had ended up being killed at the end of their series.

Who said anything about CAF?  That's what the JPEGs are for.

Just tell people to save high res TIFF scans, not just the low res JPEGs on CAF, especially if they have complete stories.

And be sure to back up the drive the scans are on.

Deacidification: Professional restorers charge $$$$ to immerse art in baths that do this, but there are alternatives (Bookkeeper) that are much less expensive and basically DIY.  LOC has lots of experience with it.

Not to be confused with:

Remember, this art is going to outlive us.

15 hours ago, Will_K said:

can creators please archive images of their art ??

Polls of favorite artist editions consistently rate Mazzucchelli's Born Again as many people's favorite. 

We wouldn't have that AE if Mazz had not saved high-res scans of his art before selling it.

A lot of pre-modern stories are being broken up by dealers, who pick them up at auction.  It would be nice if they could save TIFF scans (not just the low-res JPEGs they put on their Web sites) of the stories they are breaking up and selling off. 

Perhaps collectors could save such scans before selling.  At least, once sold, they don't have to worry about "fresh to market" anymore, so they could share the high-res scans with the rest of us.

On 1/7/2021 at 1:00 PM, RBerman said:

Even in the lower price tier, there are preservation opportunities. 

This is great, and it brings up another point.

When dealers think of "preserving" stories, I'm sure they are only concerned with the "classics."  When Master Race went up for auction, someone on this board differentiated it from the rest of the "pop culture memorabilia" because of its historical significance.

Here's an analogy, though.  Imagine people were collecting movies in the 1950s.  You'd look at the Oscars for the popular consensus for what is "good."  You would completely overlook this little film, that most people at the time did not know what to make of, that only got two technical Academy Award nominations, and that for many years was out of distribution and only available for viewing on bootleg prints (illegal copies belonging to collectors)

But this overlooked film has in the last decade been chosen by Sight and Sound as the best film ever made, supplanting Citizen Kane (which itself was largely overlooked when it first came out).

So, a couple of points.  First, who is to say what's worth preserving?  Maybe people, who consider themselves diligent, are breaking up stories that will be considered lost classics in the future.

And, as a corollary to Buy What You Like, let's add, Conserve What You Like.  With popular and critical tastes bifurcating, maybe the best we can do is to save the "cult classics" for people that share our opinion of them, and leave the big ticket items like Master Race to the museums (those that are able to survive in our changing world).

CAF is a great resource for the hobby, but it has its limitations.

For one thing, it's all focused on single pages (with provision for auxiliary images).  For that reason, as I understand it, the annual Best Art "awards" have no category for stories.  The best you'll get is a splash page.  

There's lots of stuff in black hole collections (including stuff that shows up in artists editions) that isn't on CAF, and even people who put stuff on CAF (or 2D) often don't put everything there.  People want their privacy, or they don't want to have to fend off half-assed offers, or they want their art "fresh to market" when it sells, or .....

I'd say CAF is more geared towards showing off and selling pages, but less to building an inventory (let alone a scan database) of what's out there.

There's also the issue of people keeping TIFF images on local drives that fail with no backup, or just get thrown away.

19 minutes ago, Rick2you2 said:

I save scans off what I have, either at 300 or 600 dpi. 

That's great, but Dunbier, who has a lot of experience with this, asks for 1200 dpi scans, otherwise it's difficult to do image processing.  And while presumably most people do their best, some of the scans in the artists editions are woeful. 

If you look at the artists editions, the ones that have complete stories are typically where either someone has kept all the art together (EC is the best example) or has actually gone to the trouble of reassembling the stories.  The Wrightson, Cockrum and Byrne artifact editions contain no complete stories, because Dunbier could only locate isolated pages.  All those stories are gone.  The example I know of where an AE was possible, because someone saved high-res scans, was Mazzucchelli's Born Again.

And then there are the people who don't want to share scans of their art, because fresh to market.  I've even heard of people refusing to share scans just for comic restoration purposes, which was a surprise.

35 minutes ago, heartened said:

Are you asking about preserving complete OA stories?

Yes.

Here's another aspect to the discussion: How do we make decisions about what to save or effectively discard?

Right now it's individual collectors and dealers, who make decisions all the time about which stories to keep in their collection, versus which stories are broken up for selling.  Someone made the decision to break up a story that many regard as one of Wrightson's best, that story is now gone:

This is regarded as one of Russ Heath's best stories for the same publisher. The story is still together, and if the physical pages are ultimately lost or broken up, at least it has appeared in an IDW artist's portfolio edition, so it has been "saved":

On the other hand, there is no artist's edition or artist's portfolio for the story below.  I have heard several people argue that this is not just the best story that Russ did for them, it was the best story published by that publisher, period:

Who is to say who's right?  How do we decide what should be preserved for future generations?  This is why, in film preservation, Martin Scorsese advocates for saving everything.  We should not arrogate to ourselves the decision of what will or will not be preserved for future generations.

If you want to say, trust in the marketplace, Citizen Kane struggled to make a profit at the box office, while the Andy Hardy films made a tidy profit.

There's a lot that's been lost.  Toth's Battle Flag of the Foreign Legion, regarded by many as the Citizen Kane of comic book storytelling, is gone, forgotten by most collectors of comic art.  We still have Krigstein's Master Race, although many of us were shocked when the Lucas Museum did not purchase it when it came up for auction, so it looks like we can't rely on Obi-Wan Lucas to be our only hope to save this art form:

But we can also say that this has appeared in an IDW artists edition, so Scott Dunbier has high-res scans in his database, so if the original pages are lost, even though we won't be able to view the pages in a physical museum, it'll be available for people that possess the artists edition (and comic restorers can use that when they want to produce high-quality restorations of the original comic).

On the other hand, if we're relying on Scott Dunbier to save all our art, anybody working in IT will tell you that relying on a Single Point of Failure is a Very Bad Idea.

I was having a discussion with someone about saving comic art for future generations, and they suggested I try starting a discussion here.

The issue is, will future generations be able to appreciate the "great" stories in their original art form, or will they have to be satisfied with scans of tired old comic books, printed using the cheapest printers the publishers could find in the 1950s, 60s or 70 (or effectively redrawn as part of the process of comic restoration efforts)?

This topic came up in a discussion that many may be missing, and the information should be more readily available.

With the demise of the comicart-l mailing list, there are for now two mailing lists for discussion of comic art:

comicartl@freelists.org

comic-art@groups.io

As with the original comicart-l, discussion is predominantly spam and discussions of comic art, rather than the discussion of market values that predominates here.  More discussion of comic art than spam since the demise of comicart-l, but that might change if the membership increases.  If dealers start spamming the list, I hope the moderators will put a limit on the length of a message, unlike the comic art marketplace forum here.

Unlike Facebook, posts can be found more than a few days after they are made, and you're not sharing your life with Facebook.

This is what mail digests on the groups.io list look like;

This is what the Freelist mail digest looks like.  It's converting rich text emails to plain text for archiving, making a very bad job of it, and then generating the digests from the archives. It can't even get the hyperlinks right:

And then sometimes it gets confused about the character set encoding and we get this:

2013 José Ortiz

6 hours ago, alxjhnsn said:

It's happened. Mark Landis was really good.

New Yorker article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/26/the-giveaway

Felix Comic Art Interview with Mark: http://www.felixcomicart.com/podcastdetail.asp?pId=32

What was interesting to me, was that the guy who first cottoned on to Landis and tried to raise the alarm.....got fired.

Using this thread for some items for sale on The Bay.

I will be selling a number of B&W 1970s horror magazines, including Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and 1994, a couple of Skywald and Marvel.  The books are generally in mid-grade, some lower grade, with a few higher grade. I think that covers all the possibilities.

The usual boilerplate rules for this thread apply:

1. No HoS or Probation list buyers.
2. Payment via Paypal or Zelle.
3. Shipping via USPS Priority for $16 for the continental United States, for the first six books.  For more than six books, shipping will be quoted.  Shipping for Canada will be quoted.
4. First  in the thread wins.
5. Returns accepted for 7 days after delivery.

Since this should be a quick sale, I'll offer up front a 20% discount if you purchase three or more books.

Feel free to PM questions.   

For big budget items involving currency transfers, a credit card is inadvisable, and the exchange rates that banks offer are not much better.  Transferwise has a clever business model where they try to balance funds transfers in their network in both directions between two currencies, as much as possible avoiding the currency markets altogether.  The only drawback I've had is the braindead US banking system that makes transfers into Transferwise's network expensive ($30) and inconvenient.  But once the funds are in their system, the holdup in transferring funds is usually the banks themselves that require manual checks.

When I've sold OA, I don't accept payment by CC, too much scope for chargeback fraud.  Regular vendors accept it as the cost of doing business, part of their overhead.  If you're not sure you can trust the seller, ask for references.

16 hours ago, aokartman said:

As estates dissolve, opportunities arise.

RIP Jeff Gorrell.

With this hobby breaking up stories and scattering the individual pages to oblivion, I was hoping that at least some of this twentieth century art form would be preserved as artists editions.  Unfortunately the scans are not 100% faithful reproductions:

The Jack Kirby New Gods artists editions is notorious for its mediocre scans.

We don't go to art museums to look at lithographs.