ESeffinga

Baker Street sort of qualifies as the first issues were originally published in late 89, but I don't think I saw any of it stateside until 1990ish. I've always thought of it as an early 90s book anyway, since that's when the bulk of it came out. Poe on the other hand was 100% a 90s book. And for what it's worth, I was the guy that bought that page (and 4 or 5 others, and a commission) from Asala at Small Press Expo in probably 1996-97ish. Asala brought the first ashcans of the book, and then in subsequent years, the issues as they came out. I remember getting some fun stuff from SPX back in the 90s. Good times. This thread is such a nostalgia trip for me. My younger brother was actually big into Mage for a while. I used to have a couple really fun Flaming Carrot pieces from Burden, and remember the first time I met him in Atlanta. He struck me as being as much fun as his book. Tons of funny memories. And seeing these pieces is making even more bubble up. Stuff I haven't thought of in years. I used to cast a much wider net for art back when it was cheap and I picked up pieces just for the fun of it (as opposed to the LOVE of each). That Baker street piece is a damn fine example by the way! I adore Guy Davis' artwork. And if I was a more of a m=nostalgia collector I'd certainly have some Baker Street art. I've flirted with the thought even so, several times over the years. I'd also have some Wagner (Hunter Rose) Grendel. Maybe a page or two from Samurai. Definitely would want something Elfquest. Critters (the birthplace of Usagi Yojimbo, and years of fandom from me). Etc and so on. As a total aside to the topic, I remember driving around the Beltway to Jim Warden's house, to pick up a Fabry painting ages ago, and him showing me all the Byrne stuff he had, and also these stacks of Wagner pages. Some older, but mostly the new Warchild material. He even had a dresser downstairs full of stacks of art from Ploog, and so on. What a surreal day.

That documentary is a riot. Worth watching even without it being the homework assignment. Go wach it!

Pretty sure THIS was one of the toys that started the whole harmful to kids choking hazard thing if i recall correctly? Maybe more historically important for that, than it's nostalgia ties. Edit: Found a couple links... turns out it was the viper from the same line. https://io9.gizmodo.com/13-of-the-most-dangerous-and-deadly-toys-ever-made-1647200302 http://theswca.com/textf/toydeath.html

Man I forgot how egregious they are.

I also don't want to just pick on Boris. There are a number of fantasy artists that use poor photo reference. I think he was just the first I noticed it with when much younger. But many many do it. Mostly because it's hard to do well, and takes some effort. In some respects I'd relate it to something like the Uncanny Valley effect in a strictly visual sense. People know what is "right" innately. And they know when something is "off". Sometimes it's harder to see than others. The human body uses specific muscles to do specific things. So when someone draws their superheroes in full flex mode at all times, they come off as stiff, and "off". Where as when someone manages to imbue a drawing with casual gestures, and the little details that reveal naturalness of posture or the "truth" in a figure's movement, it may evade someone knowing why it looks right, but not be able to articulate exactly why. And this is where good photo reference comes in. It'd impossible to get photo reference of say, a man fighting a dragon. But when someone takes the time to take photos of a model actually acting out the motions in a believable way, and then draws from a selection of that reference, they can imbue some life into those drawings that will come across as true, even if fudged in many aspects. The same with animals, cars, etc. And why so much made up mechanical stuff looks bad, and why we love work from guys that do fake or impossible machinery well, and make us believe. But the thing is, without photo reference, sometimes those clues are missing. Lighting, what really happens when swinging a club or sword. And this is where it can be very instructive to the observant enough to pick up on them. Life drawing is also very important, but life drawing from real moving people, and not just just posed flesh and blood still-lifes, if you know what I mean. Some super observant creators do well without photo reference, but a great many are truly enhanced by it. It's just a matter of knowing what to use, and what not to. You can actually see this in stock photography as well. The great material looks very casual, as if candids were taken of a real interaction or moment. The lousy stuff looks posed and full of artifice. You can tell when someone is acting out a motion or emotion, instead of experiencing it. Same difference with the reference pics. But I digress... By the by, I've heard over the years abut how Frank never used reference photos but I think sometimes the case is otherwise. And I do believe Doc Dave mentioned something about this before as well. Also I donn't think it a coincidence that Frank was into Photography. A great many artists are also photo savvy. It's a super instructional learning tool. And Frank never let the real get in the way of a good image, as can be attested by such images as this doozy. Ain't no way those arms are coming down past those horns, but hey, it looks cool, even being one of his scruffier pieces. I remember there being a Fraz piece that sold on Heritage a few years back where the guy had waaaayyy to many ab muscles. Not anatomy at all, but again, it looked powerful and pretty darn cool.

^I'm with Gene. And to be honest taking a hard look at my own collecting habits, that reasoning is in many ways why I don't own some of that material either, and a variety of guys in capes for that matter. Batman being my one exception it seems. And the Hale Badhair painting is about as close as I have come. And Phil would be the very first to tell you that the Johnny Badhair character was initially his attempt to channel some of the explosive energy of the single Frazetta image into a more modern character. And yet it has since spun away from that in the 30 years since. The kernel is still there, but it's drifted, much in the vein of Cerebus or something of that ilk, that's veered left of it's start. In Phil's case more into exploring human condition issues in an illustration mashed into a form of fine art kind of way. He talked about that struggle a bit at the first of the Spectrum Art Live shows about 6 or 7 years ago. The guys with the Sidebar Podcast used to have his talk up as an episode. Not sure if that's still floating around out there on the internet, for anybody that might care. And I get that even that will have its proponents and detractors, and frankly folks that just don't get it. Anyhow it is very easy to overwork a piece and kill it's energy and verve. Often times when an artist is working on a piece, it's very hard to tell how far to push, and often they don't know what too far is until they've already pushed it there. And at the risk of pushing the topic way too far off topic, it happens with pen and ink too. Pencil is lively because the gestural drawings are there intact. It's muscle memory at it's finest. Not thinking about drawing an arm, just doing it because you've drawn an arm 10,000 times before. The same with painting. If one is too precious about filling in an under-drawing, and then rendering the bejeesus out of it, they risk losing the feel and dynamics of that muscle memory of mark making. Worrying about getting a photo-real smooth oiled skin texture frequently comes at the expense of the pieces having energy. Add in the almost cut-and-paste aspect of many of Boris' figures, and this is why the earlier work seems to much better to my eye. He wasn't so worried about being slavish to his reference material. He was more dynamic and even exaggerated, and less fussy about getting the smoothest skin tones he could. Probably because he just hadn't evolved to that level. Not unlike a guitarist playing with punk rock fury, or rocking and rolling, before getting into the super technical wheedly wheedly shreddy guitar solos that really only appeal to a select few, and put everyone else to sleep, or seem clownish. Later Boris is wheedly whee to me. He rendered the hell out of this, but it's just not good structurally. You can smooth everything out with time and technique, but if you start off with figures flexing on the ground and stick them up in the air, it doesn't mean they'll look like they are leaping. Nobody jumps like this... And this gets into a big reason why I don't have too much cape art. So many of the poses and gesticulations are so goofy, they don't seem dynamic to me, they seem silly. I like artistic distortions. Pushing things beyond reality even, and heavy stylistic executions. But to me the takeaway stylistic execution of later era Boris is cheese, and lots of it. It's no accident that people like the Vacation poster. It's what I think Boris really excels at, which is spoofing that style of art, as a master of it. He couldn't be any better positioned to do so. A willingness to pike fun at himself and the genre is one of his endearing qualities in my eyes. I don't want it on the wall, but I definitely respect it. -e.

Not mine yet, but maybe someday. I have the perfect place picked out for it and everything! Would fit in beautifully, right next to the Liefeld.

26 years at least...

It wasn't Mike, if i'm not mistaken he said it was his daughter Katie selling them. He gave them a bit of a bump on his social media I'm sure. If he gave them to her to sell, I'm not aware. Or why, though I'm pretty sure she just graduated college and is about to start Vet school, so maybe she just needed the funds?

I’m not even a Doctor Strange fan, and I thought that Skottie Young cover was great the moment I saw it. Fun piece!

Is this your guy? https://www.pulpartists.com/AA.html

Indeed. I'd chalk that up as a VERY cheap lesson in OA and production art. I've seen folks drop hundreds, and even thousands on stuff that is not legit. At least now you know, and even where to ask around if you don't.

I do, actually. I just don't want to dedicate enough space to them to have more than a handful of my absolute favorites. Same goes with graphic novels/hardcover collections these days too. I put it off for as long as I could, but eventually started putting together digital collections of some titles that I like to go back and read from time to time, along with any new titles I read digital only. I will only ever buy printed copies of my most favorite titles, and only what seems like the best edition in each instance. For me this means nicest but most practical book for that volume of work. So I only have a few of Absolutes on my shelves for instance. I actually kept all my old 1st print Sandman hardcovers rather than buying all the Absolutes. Even though the printing is nicer on the Absolutes, they are so much bigger, I find them heavy and unwieldy to actually read. But I do have the Absolute Hush, Long Halloween and DK for instance. With those, I read them less often and more like to just look at them from time to time, or use them as a reference book when I want to look up a specific page or sequence. For the me size of the AE books and the other books of that sort, makes them fun to set one out on the coffee table for folks to flip through, or to have tucked in a small corner of my little comic library room at home. If I ever get around to building out the in-closet shelving in there, I might have some better dedicated space for books of that size, but they also compete with records, as the vinyl is also space consumptive, like the books. I actually keep my record collection like my book collection. Only the favorites on vinyl, and the rest all digital for space reasons. Back before iTunes and digital music took off, I had a walk in closet full of records, CDs and such. So yeah, size can be in issue in that context.

I absolutely knew someone was going to say something like that when I posted it...

Had a chuckle at the 18" x 24" Big art, you say? In all seriousness, I actually have had to sell art that was larger than I was told it was, simply because the walls of the house are so intensely curated, that the size of a piece can be criticl for me to fit it on the wall without over-cluttering the space to my tastes. So yeah, I actually have sold a couple things because they were "larger than advertised." It's pretty rare though. I try to go into every purchase knowing exactly what I'm going to do with work. And yes, 11" x 17" are easier because they can go in an Itoya, which I try desperately not to do unless it feels absolutely necessary. Collector gene and all. -e.

My best guess... hidden archival japanese hinge on the back? I've done several that way in the past.

I’m more than a bit off-center when it comes to approaching the hobby, and have never quite thought of myself as a stand in for the average collector. But fwiw, I couldn’t give a fig for anyone’s opinion on what artist might be the next “other artist”, or that “this title” is going to be for this artist, what “this other title” was for another guy. I tend to latch onto a work because I like it, and that is where my interest tends to start and stop. So if Felix uses a comparison, in my Neanderthal brain, I think to myself, he is really excited by that artist and/or that project and I make a mental note to check it out for myself. IMO, Felix has shown he has a better than average taste-meter. And all one has to do is look at the accolades heaped on his guys in the form of reviews, awards, marketplace interest and so on to see that. He has also reinvented the role of art rep as far as I’m concerned. He has crafted avenues of promotion, and just general hobby fun among and for his guys, and with their fan bases as well. He is inclusive, generous, and all around seems like he just likes hanging out with them. And he’d know better than me, but from what I’ve seen he’s helped elevate their profiles and gain exposures for them that go beyond just selling their artwork. Is there excited hyperbole to in some of the newsletter pitches? Possibly. Time will tell. If anything I just see a guy that gets super excited to share work with the audiences he’s helped garner for his guys, and trying to hip people to work that has him jazzed. I used to have a local comic shop guy who did that for me. He’d tell me how I needed to check out this book or that book, and he’d compare it to some other book (or movie). Some of his pitches were a little hype heavy for me, but I could tell it was a genuine enthusiasm for the product. It wasn’t an attempt to squeeze me for a few dollar sale. That would have been so short sighted of him. I appreciated it then and I appreciate it now,with Felix. He’s turned me onto some cool books, and even though I haven’t bought any pages from them, it’s because of him I’ve read all Tradd’s Luther Strode books, and Bertram’s House of Pennance, among others. In the end, I want to see Harren be the best Harren he can be. Tradd should push his mind bending work as far as he can, etc and so on. I’ve no interest in DWJ being he next Miller, Kirby Moebius or whatever. Those guys were those guys. DWJ will kick on his own, and people will notice. If the work is good, the rest will come. I can’t wait to see what Felix’s guys do in the future. There may be some great nuggets in there. But if I ever buy something that becomes genre defining or industry evolving from him, it’d be because I loved that art, story, artist... and the other mess can come later ... or not. Anybody that goes actively looking for it is on a fools errand as far as I’m concerned. -e.

Out there somewhere is some kid who will be keeping their Dad's collection of framed commissions of knocked out naked superheroines, just because of how much it meant to him, and/or how nostalgic Powergirl's boobies make them for when they were young and saw them every day growing up.

That Shimizu Batman is so lovely! Fantastic.

Pretty much.

About 2 & 1/2 months or so? So, it's entirely plausable someone could have done the work to it, and shifted it off onto Rich. If I remember right, it popped up in my feed the day the Coolines site first posted it up. It wasn't long after NYCC. Just a couple weeks or so. I blame ComicArtTracker!

I can add a first hand perspective to this Pope tale, as that was a piece I really really wanted when it came up on Heritage, but life happened and I missed the auction. So when the DBs posted the piece to their site I was gutted. I also thought, man theyy did a number on that piece in Photoshop to desaturate the sepia areas and make it look much darker and so contrasty... but then I've seen that happen with many sellers in the past. I don't like it, but it's not unheard of. I just usually ask about it up front, like everything that gives me pause. I've been around a LONG time and have always been aware of the brothers' stories. Up to that point I'd only ever asked about pieces here and there, and pretty much to a piece, every price was roughly 300% of it's recent street price. And nothing I'd ever asked after was worth that markup (to me). But after a week or so of stewing on it, and much internal hand wringing, I shot an email over to the Coolines website. I only ever spoke with Steve... though when I asked about the Pope piece, as if on cue, the response was that the piece was of course his brothers. And so my questions had to be put to him, though Rich and I never actually spoke. Anyway, so I asked after 2 things. I asked if the piece had ever been worked on (I mean the scan sure did look darker than I remembered it). I mentioned to Steve about Paul's use of the brush pens that tend to fade to a sepia tone, and are present on pretty much all the work from this period. I told him I expected the piece had areas of faded inkwork, and others would be rich and black from use of india ink. Also potentially present might be some marker or other stuff. Paul really was using a lot of tools in the early years. So I told Steve that I didn't mind if the piece was faded, but I absolutely wouldn't accept a piece of art that had been worked on. In response to my questions about any potential restoration work having been done on it, he said he thought there might have been some tape on the back at one point, but it appeared that it had been carefully removed with no signs of residue. That was it. He assured me there was some fading and some brownish brush areas like I was describing, but said the main characters were all a rich black, which pretty well jived with what I was expecting. He sent over a couple photos. One of the front and one of the back. They were inside shots with no lights on, so they were dark, and the piece was out of focus, but I was mostly looking at these to see how the edges of the board were cut, or not. Paul also had a habit of using these huge drawing boards and occasionally the work is only on a portion of the board, off centered, irregularly cut, etc. So I mostly wanted to see how big the art was on this board, and make sure when they listed the size (which is Paul's preferred art size), that I wasn't going to get a piece that was half that big, on a really big sheet of bristol. I looked at these on my phone (like a newb insufficiently_thoughtful_person) and I was happy to see the art was pretty much filling the board. In fact I was so happy to hear that my suspicions about possible tampering were unfounded, and that the sepia brushwork was in fact there, that I didn't do enough digging. Did I mention I REALLY wanted this piece? So, even against my own misgivings, I bit the bullet, paid roughly 3 times over market for the piece (like I said I REALLY wanted this thing), and had Steve ship it to me. He told me he thought I was really going to like it. It went out at the end of that week. The day Steve shipped it to out to me, I was looking at the photos he sent me, not on a phone or tablet, but on my big Mac screen. I was trying to figure out how I wanted to frame the piece and arrived safely. I had saved the Heritage scan, which I thought looked overly hot/blown out/faded based on how Paul's faded sepia brushpen pieces looks on what I own already. I was already using the Heritage scan for mocking up some framing ideas. I was excited. My plan was to reach out to Paul about possibly having him look at the piece, and maybe even work out something to have him touch up the faded bits. I even spoke to him one day, forwarded him the photo from Steve to ask about the history of the piece. The Coolines site says that it was for the French edition, but if it is, it's for a French edition I don't have. (I have copies of Escapo in French, Polish, Spanish, every hardcopy and softcover edition published in the States.) Paul said he thought it may have been a promo drawing, but he said he wanted a good scan of it if i could send him one when the piece came in. We also talked about the fading pen usage (he blamed Toth for advising him to use every tool he could) and other stuff. Back to the framing mockups... On a lark, I opened up Steve's photos to color correct for the dark shadowy photo, and see how it looked in comparison in the same frame, since I thought the Heritage scan looked to yellow and washed out. When I did the Photoshop correction, I immediately noticed some areas that looked hinky. Primarily the machine areas. Those should have been more faded than they appeared in my newly tweaked copy of Steve's dark photo of the piece. But again, the photo was dark and out of focus, so hard to really tell. But the one area that was sharp was that corner signature circle. It clearly looked like a bad trace job around the circle. I started noticing other areas that looked wacky. I contacted Steve and told him about what I was seeing, sent photos of my corrected areas that looked problematic and expressed my misgivings about the piece's originality. Steve was very courteous throughout. His reply was that he asked his brother about it, and he indicated that Rich had just picked this piece up at NYCC, and they were just excited by how great it looked. They were not aware if any work might have been done to it between when Heritage had it and when Rich bought it. Just that when he packed it, he noted how much darker it was than other Pope pieces. But he also said if I got it and it was not right, they'd gladly do a refund. Than he was more interested in a repeat customer than a single sale. 2 days later, the piece arrived, and within 3 minutes of having it open, I knew it was allwrong. The linework compared to the Heritage scan was overinked, fat, didn't line up in many cases. More importantly someone tried to replicate brushpen work with a single thickness marker, so the tapers were "colored in", rather than a clean brush stroke. I was so mad, I wasn't thinking very straight. Paul's parts of the piece that were still intact were gorgeous! I did take a couple pictures through the plastic it was wrapped in, but I didn't even want to handle it. I didn't want to leave anyone any room to try and claim it had been damaged or whatever and back out of the refund, or try and do a partial refund or whatever. I took 3 quick photos of a couple things. I repacked it within 10 minutes of it being there, and contacted Steve to give him the news. He simply said to ship it back, which I did the following day when the PO opened. The day it arrived there Steve let me know it arrived safe and sound, and that he'd issued the refund. He was immensely friendly through the whole process. I expected more pushback or defensiveness. There was none. So, I learned a lesson i thought I already knew. Always trust my gut and my brain, no matter what my heart tells me it wants. Also, I am beyond pissed that the piece was thrashed. I'd been waiting to cool down a bit to write Felix about it, because I figured he would want to know. I'm glad someone hipped him to it faster than me. My only excuse for not saying anything sooner is the whole thing made me so crushed, I didn't want to invest the time to write all this down over it. As I'm writing this now, it really is sapping the joy out of me. And I noted just the other day, despite my sending Steve the info about the piece, the Heritage scan and some of my own photos as proof of how much the piece was worked on, they have not changed the descriptor of the piece to mention that the work was done on it at all. It's not like they are unaware of it at this point. That also makes me sad and angry. Steve, for his part, couldn't have been a nicer guy. I can't prove that they were the ones that altered the art, clearly. But I can say they know it was altered, because I told/showed them. -e. p.s. I so wanted that piece!!!! p.p.s. I kept all correspondence from day one, for CYA purposes. I may have been an insufficiently_thoughtful_person, but not a complete total insufficiently_thoughtful_person.

Although now that I think of it, I’m not sure I have ever used the default software to make my scans. Since I always take my scans into photoshop anyway, I’ve just been using Photoshop to acquire the scanner function directly. I’ll have to check into the scanner software it came with to see how that works. Never honestly tried it. And I sometimes forget not everyone keeps a copy of Photoshop on their computer.

Mine is being used with my Mac. As I recall, setup was a breeze.

I have a white one sitting behind me on a stand. Got it last spring. It's wireless, so no hooking up unless you want to. I use it to print to wirelessly, and I do all my page scanning wirelessly. It took me a bit to figure out how to get scans I was happy with (right out of the box, the default settings are a bit too high in contrast for my liking, but I've gotten some incredibly good scans off of it since. Its not nearly as nuanced as a really great flatbed, but for the cost (I think I paid $200 for it on a previous sale) the bang for the buck factor is great. It is a pretty big puppy though, but not as bad as so many others, with goofy trays sticking out of both ends and whatnot. The prints off it are pretty good too! Have fun.