delekkerste

It's probably this. It says "Preliminary" and "ink and wash over graphite" with no mention of gouache, watercolor, etc.

I'm sure that it does...not.

I picked up Sgt. Fury Annuals #2, 3 and 4 out of the 25 or 50 cent bin as a kid and all three issues are uber-nostalgic for me. That said, whenever art from these issues has come up for sale (the best being the Ann. #4 cover which hit the auction block in 2022), it's always gone for more than I wanted to pay. Sadly, that was the case too with this Ann. #3 splash. BUT...I saw in the auction previews that 4 pages from Annual #3 were upcoming in the Weekly auction that ended last night and that I liked the two battle pages that followed the page 1 splash even more, so, I didn't go overboard on the splash knowing that these other pages were coming up for sale. I ended up easily winning both of the panel pages last night (pp. 2-3) plus the page 4 splash for a combined 61% less than where the page #1 splash sold for. So, I'm extremely pleased with that. I also won the lot of 9 pages from Sgt. Fury #94, so, in all, I got a 3-page sequence of two awesome twice-up battle pages and a twice-up splash, plus 9 cool pages from another issue for 75% of the cost of the page #1 splash. Again, I'm very, very happy with that result. Oh, and it must be said - go look at the page #1 splash and also the pp. 2-3 sequence from Annual #3 that I won last night in the HA archives. Now ask yourself: had D ick Ayers ever actually seen a Vietnamese person before drawing these pages?

Here's another mindboggling factoid: the reported $2 million sale of the 9.8 TOS #39 was to a middleman, not the consignor. The middleman almost surely flipped it to the consignor for even more. Also, the 9.8 was a 9.4 that was somehow pressed up 2 full notches after others who viewed the book as a 9.4 thought its potential had already been maximized and passed on it. I'd still take the book over the art every day of the week and twice on Sunday. At the end of the day, it's top census, population 1.

IT

Today's live session has been going on for almost 9 hours now.

Nah, it's a nice cover, but I don't think the consignor goes from being OK with having only a $90K (hammer) reserve on it in this auction to needing 10x that much to sell it if it were on one board. The reality is that the other DD/Elektra covers - #168, 174, 175, 176 and 181 - are all way above this one in desirability and a lot of people would probably take the #179 (Elektra + DD mask only) over it as well. If anything, the fact that the cover has increased over 5-fold in the past 13 years (8-fold from where it petered out in CLink's open auction) to $252K more likely means that no one really cares about it being on two boards anymore (or at least there are enough high rollers who don't). I know that the two-boards fact held me back in 2011; if I was going for the cover now, it definitely wouldn't. The consensus from those I've spoken to is that it met or outperformed expectations. Don't think I've heard anyone before now suggest that it could/should have gone even higher. That said, I get your love for the cover as I have very fond memories of it as well. But I think the market got it right this time.

Considering the reserve was $90K hammer on the DD #190 cover, I'm pretty sure the seller is very happy! People may not remember, but, it was auctioned in 2011 at ComicLink and did not meet reserve, fetching only $31.5K before the bidding petered out. The consignor reached out to CLink after the auction and bought it; CLink later publicly reported the sale at $45K in the "Marketplace" section of its website. I remember the sale well - it seems so trivial now, but, back in 2011, there was a lot of trepidation about the cover being on two boards, something which almost nobody cares about these days as we all know that high-quality acetate overlays and such can be easily made (heck, you could even turn these into *two* covers, LOL). IMO both the #174 page and the #190 cover achieved very full and fair values.

You know, prior to 5 minutes ago, I would have said that Palmer's inks made everyone's pencils look better, but, for Sienkiewicz, I think people just want that trademark scratchy, loose-but-dynamic (and, later, more experimental) style of him inking himself rather than Palmer's bold and tidy inks that worked great with practically every other penciller.

It's a nice piece, but, I think to make a bigger splash it needed to be main run Moon Knight and inked by Sienkiewicz himself. And, sure, later in the run does better than earlier in the run but I bet this would have still gotten a lot of love if it had been early in the main run and inked by Bill.

The $18K Slave Leia page from the Sep. 2023 sale? Absolutely. Wish I had been paying attention to that one.

These 1st run Cockrum pages are definitely undervalued on a relative basis. That page is early and fantastic.

DC tax discount. Me: Deals are few and far-between today. My friend: And are only DCs.

"I see my Marianne walkin' away..." Marianne has returned!

He wanted to reduce his expenses so he could buy more Garfield art.

Even his original accuser walked back some of her statements after the initial report and said that people were embellishing what she said with added, salacious details that she says she never said. The woman who accused him of what you quoted above deleted her tweet prior to today and turned out to be a spurned former lover who Piskor says piled on to the original story to hurt him. I think the reality is that we don't know the real truth here - people just accepted the accusation at face value without examining or questioning any of it and now it appears that it may not even be true (read Piskor's suicide note for more details on this). The court of public opinion convicted him of being a groomer and sexual predator which caused almost everyone to cut business and personal ties with him, driving him to suicide. Even if we took the accusations at face value, he didn't deserve to die or lose his ability to make a living over that. And now we've learned both today and over the last week that maybe the accusations were taken out of context and embellished and that some of it may not have even been true at all.

He's going back.

Tom heard that Michael was moving to Houston and accepted a work assignment down in South America for the next 2+ years. (the part about Michael; Tom really is going expat)

I wish!!

Trading a solid Alan Davis X-Men page from the Mutant Massacre storyline for a Will Meugniot DNAgents cover was, admittedly, probably not the best deal I've ever made.

It was always edited - I'm not sure why it shows up blank in the preview (still does) but blacked out when you blow it up.

This one (pleasantly) surprised me. Having paid a very big price for the JSF cover I bought a couple years ago, I was glad that this one did not bomb.

Translation: "I am a huge perv!"

Overall, I saw very few results, a lot of stuff that was in-line, and a lot of stuff that felt a bit squishy. Me and some friends picked up some nice bargains on the lower end (the piece I bought I'm told was listed much higher on a European dealer's site previously) but there was a lot of stuff in the mid-range that seemed pretty to me price-wise as well. Maybe the most surprising was the Herge Tintin piece which sold for $15K against a posted estimate of $30,000-$60,000. But there were plenty of other results that favored buyers over sellers I thought - IMO those two FF #27 pages went cheap ($22.5K each) given the content (even accounting for the George Roussos inks); the catalog cover painting only fetched $8.1K and the Kent Williams DD/Elektra painting only brought $10K, which seems stupidly low for a well-known piece with two very popular characters from that time period. That said, I'm still expecting very strong results for the upcoming (U.S.) Signature Auction as I suspect it will draw far more buyers than this mixed bag of European and U.S. art (lacking in marquee pieces, it has to be said) did.