Michael Browning

I always thought Redondo had started work on other books of The Bible, but they never saw print.

Yeah, I knew it several days ago, but wasn’t sure if it was public knowledge yet, or else I would have said something when the first post was made. Such a sad time for Jim and his family.

It was very mean-spirited. When he was trying to get me to buy his cover, he also took a video of a portfolio of art that I'd put on the ORIGINAL COMIC ART Facebook group and offered to sell pieces of my art to other collectors. He would then come back to me and ask how much I'd take for the art and then TOLD me he was offering my art up for sale because he was only looking to make a profit, not to actually keep any of the art. But, I got my revenge. He later tried to burn a guy who inherited a lot of art and was asking for help with values on Facebook. He told the guy that he would give him $3500 -- but that he couldn't tell anyone and if he got him into a bidding war, he would pull the $3500 offer and he'd have to sell for less. I found out what he was doing and offered my help to the guy who inherited the art. It was an amazing collection of art, worth WAY more than $3500. I hooked the guy up with a friend of mine and he sold five of the 38 pieces for $26,500 and he's currently in the process of selling more.

It sold way too cheap. I was shocked at that piece not hitting $10,000. I wish I'd have been the guy who bought it for under $5,000.

Try selling Shazam and Black Adam art after those two duds. Or, Jonah Hex right after that movie came out. Yikes. I was one of the top Jonah Hex art collectors and I hated it so badly that I sold off nearly all my Jonah Hex art at barely-break-even prices just to get rid of it. It's taken all these years for it to even START rebounding.

When DC announces a movie, you should sell, sell, sell because it always causes everything associated with that character to drop to rock-bottom prices.

Nope, I was definitely not talking about you. 😂

No, he paid HA for it - or got someone to buy it from him, he said, at a profit. He messaged me and asked me not to tell people he offered it to me at cost because he wanted to make money from it. He kept bugging me to pay HA for it so he didn’t have to and he was so annoying. Yeah, like I was really going to bail out a guy who admittedly ran up the bid against the bidder he believed was me. Nah.

I had a collector message me earlier this year. He’d bought at auction a cover he thought I was going after. He kept raising the bids for fun, thinking he was jacking them up on me, but he won it — and I wasn’t even a bidder. So, he came to me asking me to pay his debt to HA - almost $22,000 - and buy it so he didn’t have to. Uh, no.

I don’t think you should ever alter or re-ink any faded art. And I agree with BCarter. The original artist is usually NOT the right person to do restoration of a piece because too many artists want to correct mistakes they think they committed in the original drawing. There are far too many major works that have been altered by re-inking, including the cover to The Death of Captain Marvel (re-inked) and a few pages from that classic Marvel Graphic Novel, a few Starlin pieces he drew in marker and a bunch of Gil Kane covers and commissions. (A Superboy cover I once owned that was badly faded now looks like someone inked it with clots of India ink after a longtime and well-known collector had it re-inked. The collector then sold/traded it away without revealing that it was (badly and heavily) re-inked. I’m not sure why everyone jumps on the Donnelly bros for supposedly having art re-inked. I’ve never known of them doing that. I do know several major collectors who have had art altered in some way, though. For instance, I traded the cover to Crisis on Infinite Earths 6 to a collector and he didn’t like that the flashes in the Anti-Monitor’s eyes were on an acetate overlay, so he had those cut out and pasted them onto the art - he glued the flashes directly onto the eyes. A Jim Starlin unpublished cover for Cosmic Odyssey #1 was re-inked at a collector’s request by Bob McLeod because the collector didn’t like the way it looked (it was slightly faded). The same collector also almost had the Jim Starlin Miracleman #4 cover - which was done entirely in pencil and was published from those pencils - inked because he hated that the cover was in pencil. In all three of the instances I mention and the Death of Captain Marvel cover and pages were all altered by the same collector. Re-inking faded art directly over the original art destroys the published image and the integrity of the piece.

Treated like a poster and signed by everyone ON the art? I wouldn't give a $1000 for it. Yeah, Stan Lee signed everything, but why would ANY art collector have the art signed right on the art itself? Oh yeah, we all know who did that, so it shouldn't surprise us at all.

I picked these up today. I sold off all my DCU variants a few weeks ago and hadn’t intended on buying anymore. Anybody need them?

Rom is one of the better series Marvel published during that time. In my opinion, it stands with Tomb of Dracula and Master of Kung Fu as one of the most consistently-good series from beginning to end. I have the full run collected in custom-bound hardcovers, but I will still be buying the omnibuses.

Here are the two PUBLISHED covers that started off as commissions.

I’ve only had two of my 100 commissions end up as a cover — the Steranko Cap and a Luke McDonnell/Bill Wray JLA Detroit on an issue of Back Issue magazine. The McDonnell/Wray cover was thought up entirely by me and pitched to Back Issue editor Michael Eury BEFORE it was drawn, though. I then paid Luke and Bill to draw it after Michael gave it his approval. Michael liked the idea so much that he published it and my article about the JLA Detroit because the cover feature.

I'm with you on everything except not giving direction. When I have an idea for a commission, it's that idea I want drawn. The only commission where I said "do whatever you want" was the Steranko Captain America commission he drew for me that eventually became a published Captain America 75th anniversary variant cover.

He doesn't call the artist "the next best thing", though. He says a COMMISSION is the next best thing to a published page/piece.

It's not only dealers who do this. Wannabe dealers also do it.

Yeah, he should have been up front about that from the beginning.

Trading is a heckuva lot of fun. I’ve gotten some of my best pieces through trades. You have to trade with a reputable person and be ready to give a little up. If you are trying to get someone to trade with you, you should be prepared to make it worth their while — meaning to be prepared to give up more than what their piece is worth. When trading with dealers, you’ll have to give up quite a bit more, because they aren’t in the business of trading dollars for dollars.

I "liked" three pieces and was hoping to get some sort of email offer, but did not. Oh well, their loss. I was ready to buy at least one, maybe two of the pieces.

I’ve always wondered why you hadn’t bought that cover.

I saw that one and was hopeful you got it. 😊

Let’s be clear: this is a hobby where the buy-in starts at around a grand for a decent page of anything, so it’s not JUST a hobby and you’d better be aware of what you can get back out of the art, unless you’re lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills every hour. I don’t buy art thinking I am just going to flip it. I buy it because I genuinely like the art and want to own it. I really like Tradd Moore art, but I don’t like it enough to pay the super-high buy-in prices and, at that price point, yes, I am definitely thinking “if I pay five figures for a page, what will I be able to get for it in four or five years?” I’d be crazy not to consider that. I don’t sell many pieces of art and haven’t in the last couple of years; I really like every single piece in my collection. I’ve also been in this hobby for more than 25 years now, far outlasting most of the collectors who loved everything they’ve ever bought and who never intend (or intended, I should say) to sell a single piece. I’ve also bought a lot of collections of art from those-who-will-never-sell-because-they-love-their-art-so-much. Again, I like Tradd Moore art. I was one of the people really excited about his Ghost Rider and figured he would be a hot artist one day. But, I simply don’t believe people will get this huge return on investments that everyone is talking about.

There sure were a LOT of retreads in this one. Probably means even more in the next. After awhile, does it all become new again if the price keeps going up? 😉