Michael Browning

I have to admit that I don’t understand this website at all, couldn’t navigate it and finally stopped trying a few weeks ago. Very confusing and I’m just not as patient as I used to be in trying to learn new things.

After the one really bad interaction, and, after several previous years of great transactions with Mike Burkey, Tom Fleming, Will Gabri-El, Anthony Snyder and others, I don’t ever plan on trying to buy through Cadence again. Just too much hassle and too much runaround to get a simple piece of art. And, In hindsight all these years later, I’m thankful I didn’t get the art because I’m not a fan of the way Frison draws - one piece in pencil and another piece inked over a xerox (or whatever kind of printed-out copy it is that she makes) of the pencils. At the time, I didn’t really understand how I’d grow to feel about that type of art; it really made a difference to me later on. So, I feel like I dodged a bullet and I am very glad that I got my money back.

That one was mine and I sold it for what I thought it was worth. I'll be honest, it's up to the buyer what they do with it after I'm paid and it arrives in their possession. But, I was surprised to see it pop up on CAF for sale IMMEDIATELY after I sold it.

Here’s something I found in a long box of independent comics: M.A.I.N. Magazine Volume 2 No. 1 featuring Dave’s Vampirella art. MAIN stands for Mature Audience Industry News and this magazine is as much about comics as it is adult trading cards. Has anyone ever seen this before? I can’t find any photos or information about it online - anywhere. This magazine had it all: comics news, adult trading card news and ads, cartoon news, a Sabrina the Teenage Witch pinup by Dan DeCarlo, Adam Hughes Ghost and Vampirella coverage, a Stephen King interview and even WCW pro wrestling news! The back cover is an Elvira photo cover. It’s such a weird magazine, but I’d never seen it before yesterday.

I was ambitious when I started collecting. I bought my first big piece in 2001 - Miracleman 4 cover art by Jim Starlin for $800. I found an Australian collector who wanted it and traded it to him for the cover to Ghost Rider 25 (my very first trade). Then, a dealer from whom I had been buying golden age comics convinced me to trade it to him - because Ghost Rider art wasn't very popular then and wasn't a very good investment for me, he said - for the Steve Ditko Ghostly Tales 120 cover art - which he said was a much better investment. I ended up trading that toward the Crisis on Infinite Earths 6 cover art and got a huge offer of a LOT of art for the Crisis cover, so I traded it away. Those are the pieces I miss. Every single trade was carefully executed to build my collection to what it is today. I also traded away a great action page of Daredevil and Wolverine from Daredevil 197 that I miss.

I went back and looked at the 2013 attempt at buying Jenny Frison art from him and he responded very quickly and I bought the art. He promised he'd ship the very next day, 2-day priority mail, but I never received a confirmation for two days after that. I emailed and he gave me an excuse that it was the tracking numbers. I let it go four more days and still nothing showed up on the tracking and, had he shipped it 2-day, it would have made it to me by that time, so I asked him for a refund. He argued with me and I filed a paypal case to get my money back. He said he shipped it, but, a day later, he said he had the art back from the PO (it had supposedly shipped five days earlier, so how did it never make it to me, but was returned to him? Yeah, right.) and he agreed to refund my money with this message: "Jenny and I do not want future order requests or inquires on ANY kind." After 12 more days, I finally got my refund and was done with him.

Marvel Knights Millennial Visions 2001 looks like it has a Ghost Rider/Punisher character on the front cover. Is this the real first appearance of Cosmic Ghost Rider?

More than $33,000 with the fees. That’s a strong result. Hakes does well with Star Wars. I was wanting it, but fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was way out of reach.

I used to get commissions from all my favorite artists until a couple of them turned out really, really bad. But, no matter, I paid for every single one of them and never complained at all. I commissioned an artist who had the best reputation for doing commissions and he turned in the second worst Jonah Hex commission I ever bought. Instead of the great closeup of Hex that I asked for, he gave me a full-body shot of Hex from far away and he drew it in pencil and didn't ink it. After I'd paid, he said he just didn't feel like inking it, but, if I wanted to pay him an extra fee and mail it back to him, he'd ink it. But, again, he said he didn't really want to ink it. But, an artist friend of mine who had done great commissions for me, took way too long and drew for me the absolute worst commission I ever bought. After that, I decided to just buy published art. Since then, I am very particular about getting commissions. I always have very specific ideas in mind when I commission an artist and I detail those before we agree on him doing the piece. When I commissioned the late, great Ernie Chan to do a Jonah Hex, he drew it while we were on the phone and sent me the almost-finished prelim via email. It turned out to be the best Jonah Hex commission I have ever seen. The only commission I ever paid for without detailing an idea of what I wanted was from Steranko. I just told him to do a Captain America for me. It turned out so great that Marvel used it as a variant cover and it got Steranko back in at Marvel.

"Patience is a virue."

Today's dollar box finds.

Nice! I have looked and looked for the Secret City Saga foil editions for years and have never found any. I saw a Red Foil variant in a 50 cent box back in 2001 and didn't pick it up because I was so busy looking at everything, I forgot to get it. The Zorro cover is absolutely one of the best covers the company ever published (and all their covers were usually spectacular).

I was surprised to see the listing of all the comics Topps published and realizing that X-Files ran the longest, with the Xena serieses (combined) were a close second. These all started when the comic boom happened (caused by VALIANT's arrival on the scene and speculator influx) and there were some of the best writers and artists in comics working there. Unfortunately, most of the Topps stuff was licensed and of no interest to me at the time. Zorro was my favorite series from Topps (along with Dracula vs Zorro), but I also loved The Lone Ranger and Tonto miniseries by Joe R Lansdale and Tim Truman. In fact, I liked it so much, I got the graphic album cover art.

October 5 will make 13 years and five months. We were supposed to go together to Free Comic Book Day in Pikeville, Ky., and they found him dead the day before. The last time I saw him was the Wednesday before he died and, in an unexpected show of affection, he hugged me and said so softly “I love you, brother.” I pushed him away and laughed and said “What are you doing? I’m going to see you Saturday.” Those were the last words we said to each other.

I had a brother who wasn't a comic book fan, but my dad wouldn't buy me a comic book back in the late-1970s and early-1980s without buying my brother a comic book, too. My mother would write my name in the logo and his name, Steven, in the logo of his comic, even if they weren't the same, so that I wouldn't try to claim his as my own. My brother was 10 years older than me and we hardly had anything in common, but, occasionally, he'd let me come into his room and read his comics. One of the comics he had that I wanted so badly was Man From Atlantis #2. I only knew about Man From Atlantis because my mom and I watched it on TV. But, I wanted that comic book. Several years later, my brother gave me the majority of his comics. Because of the age difference and some things that took us down different roads, we weren't terribly close until the last year of his life. After he passed away, those comics he gave me became very important to me. I have tried and tried to chase down a few pieces of art from the comics he gave me. Today, I got the one piece I have chased for years: the Ernie Chan and Marie Severin cover art to Man From Atlantis #2. This piece means so much to me and I am so thankful to Mike Burkey for working with me on payments and for sending it to me early. Mike Burkey is not only the best comic art dealer in the hobby -- he is also an even greater guy and I am so appreciative of the effort he made to make sure I got this cherished piece of art. https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1580252

The sad face is because I strongly disagree and there’s not a face for that one. i don’t care who Neal Adams helped in the past. He’s only trying to help himself with this move. if you want to be so doggone righteous and help all these poor, starving artists, then donate some money to them. or, better yet, buy the Batman 251 cover and give It back to Neal.

Best dollar box find in awhile, for me. I was actually leaving the store and was standing at a table of dollar comics I’d already flipped through. My arm brushed over a ziplock bag in the box and revealed the top of the cover. I looked at it on a whim and it was a Fine copy of GI Joe 155 with the subscription card still inside. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of these in the wild and I’ve never found one so cheap.

I've been collecting comic art for 20 years now and continue to buy comics each week from several local shops. The truth of the matter is that most comic dealers don't have a clue what comic art is. They don't even understand how the process works and they think everything I bring in is either a print or that it really needs to be colored. I can take pages and covers into shops where I shop and I show them to the dealers and they generally think the art is a print. A limited edition print. They always ask "Wouldn't you rather have it colored?" "What number is it? 1-of-20 or 1-of-5?" "Would it have cost you more to have gotten a color print?" "I'd like to have a print like that." So, it's not surprising that this happened. I'm sure that dealers all over the country have original art that they have been given or bought that they dig out and sell all the time. I was in a comic shop in Pikeville, Ky., buying comics at the counter when I looked over at the wall and found the cover to Creepy #44, which I bought for a reasonable price. It had been brought in in a stack of prints and sold as one lot to the shop. It was the real deal, though. Locally, last year, a high school girl found five pieces of original art at a flea market for $5 a page. Turns out they were all Mike Gustovich splashes and a cover and they all ended up on a dealer's web site for $700-$1400 each and I believe they all sold.

Yep, it’s down, again.

Around 2003-2006, I used to buy around $150 a week in new comics from a single shop that I was very loyal to and from which I had been buying for more than a decade. At the same time, I had been selling comics on eBay to fund additional purchases of comics. My local comic shop owner got in a comic that was immediately valuable because it had an error in it and was recalled. I had asked her to put that one on hold for me and she explained the recall and that she would have to charge me more than cover because copies were already selling for higher prices online, the day of its release. I told her that was fine and that I was going to drive over and pick up my comics that day. It was more than an hour drive to her shop, so I’d call to make sure the new comics had arrived on time before I left. It was also the week that the new Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide was released, so I was excited to get the guide and the error comic. On the way, she called me back and said she had thought about it and wasn’t going to sell me the comic because all I was going to do was resell it on eBay for more money and that she figured “why shouldn’t she make all that money, instead.” I told her I was already on my way and she said I could pick up the rest of my new comics, but not the issue I had called and requested. She then proceeded to tell me how offended she was that I’d buy comics from her and then was reselling them online. “Why should I sell to you so you can make all that money when I can just keep them and sell them, myself,” she asked me. I told her that I hated she felt that way and that she could keep all the comics I had in my pull file. I didn’t go back in her shop for 10 years and bought my comics from the other shop down the street from her. When I went back into the shop a decade later, she still had that error copy which was now basically worth about cover price. All that fuss - and the loss of a nearly 10-year-regular customer - because she hated the fact that I was buying and reselling comics and making a little cash for myself. It never made sense to me, because 85%-90% of the money I was making off of reselling comics online went straight back into HER shop the very next week when I’d buy extra new comics and back issues - and she knew that.

My only Hsu - Beavis and Butthead #4 pg 30 featuring She-Hulk and Titania.

Crystar #1 by Bob Larkin framed and on my wall. My favorite painted cover. More beautiful in person than on the comic. Thanks to Bob Larkin for selling this one to me.

Can you post a list of art you own so that we know what art you might be trimming or altering?

Hmmmm... I’m not sure. I know that I bought art from Lewis Wayne Galleries about 15 years ago. Didn’t know it was a pseudonym at all, but it sure could be.

That Wayne is a friend of mine and lives close by. He owned a coal mine (or was in the coal business), but I know that we used the same comic shop for more than 20 years and I never knew of him owning one. Maybe Lewis Wayne?