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I don't know about you guys, but I personally can't sleep at night unless I've dropped at least 6 figures for the month.

Well here's this shot of that image on a polybagged shirt...

Man, that is rough. And I think the first time I've ever heard of any comic art being stolen out of someone's physical home.

Hah. Right? Kind of like hipsters and new band have been all about audio cassette tapes right now. Gotta have those old book thingies to show your brain game is on fleek.

Home Depot bucket... gets used for it's intended purpose and then thrown away. Very few survive in displayable condition. Most are trashed long term. Sounds familiar. On the flip side, all these comic originals, new comics, action figures, statues, limited edition this and thats... all treated like masterpieces of antiquity. White glove service and archival treatments for all. ... my money's on the bucket!

Anybody ever have a piece come up that they were really REALLY interested in, something that they loved, but there was just ONE THING about it that they either tried to rationalize or talk themselves around, but just couldn't quite do it? Or maybe you did, and then later regretted? A wonky hand or arm. A face that didn't quite work. Would love to hear some stories. The topic below made me think of this:

Not for nothing, but what's he (not) aiming at? That's one of those weird drawing errors that'd bug me to no end and cause me to not buy it, even if I was incredibly interested in the page.

That surfer piece is pretty rad!

At the risk of going completely off the rails with the topic, I thought the deal is that the vintage market for certain kinds of furniture is in the toilet. Since that stuff tends to run in fashion cycles, much the way that comics have their hot and cool trends. I confess to not being an expert, or even paying half attention to that market closely at all, but as a casual observer, I would think the IKEA market is driven by a certain aesthetic. That aesthetic being clean simple lines, and hard geometric shapes. In the school of mid-century, Bauhaus and nordic styles, which kind of feed back and forth these days in modern furniture design. I would personally expect that people that tend to shop at IKEA are looking for that type of stuff. From what I've seen casually, that style of vintage material with real value has been doing pretty darn well price-wise. Certainly well enough that the IKEA version of a given product is many multiples cheaper than it's vintage counterpart or source of inspiration. So for the same reasons someone may want a cover recreation of a Kirby cover because the real thing is out of reach, people buy an IKEA bookshelf and work it over? An old Victorian bookshelf, or a Louis the XIV side table, while infinitely better made, and altogether higher quality material will never look like a Kirby Cover. Or well, I'm guessing I made my larger point. I'm sure if a real equivalent can be found from the genuine article for cheaper than the market would actually bear, someone would be capitalizing on that all day long. And so to bring it back around to the topic. Until the Elvgren and larger pinup market becomes a "thing" again, those pieces will continue to lag in price. I can't help but wonder in today's environment and evolution of societal norms, if/when the (arguable) objectification of women as voyeristic "pinups" will ever come back into fashion. Especially in the long term as younger folks age into their collecting years. I'm sure they will continue to be a niche item, but at what price? As an aside: How are the prices of Avengelyne comics? Shi? Warrior Nun whassername?

I finally broke down and bought a new all-in-one HP printer/scanner deal to replace my older one. It'd been about 5 or 6 years with the last one, and the older one was a small (9x12) scan bed. The new fella does slightly larger than 11" x 17" scans, which is nice. It took a little fiddling when I set it up to get the scans flat, and not auto tweaked by the software, but once I did that, it's been OK. I use Photoshop to make any fine color tweaking scan adjustments after that. I think I've used it a couple dozen times since I bought it for OA page scans. Given the whole shebang was only $200 it seemed like a decent choice. Print wise, I've honestly not used it a lot yet. What I ahve run has been fine for an at-home inkjet printer. Truth is, I simply don't print at home much. And with that in mind... it's biggest down side for me is just the sheer size of the thing. It's compact compared to most that do what it does, but it's still big. Thankfully we have a nice cabinet behind our desk at home that it sits on OK. This is the one, I believe: https://www.staples.com/office/supplies/StaplesProductDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogIdentifier=2&partNumber=2728804&langid=-1&cid=PS:GooglePLAs:2728804&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=2728804&KPID=2728804&cvosrc=PLA.google-SALES.Printers%20%26%20Scanners&cvo_crid=205249387326&cvo_campaign=876068831&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIkNOarYr11gIV0AOGCh3AVwieEAQYByABEgLXLfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds As for big pieces, I usually use photographer's lights with diffusers and umbrellas. I bought a cheap set a long time ago on Amazon, for like $100 or so for the pair. With the brightest bulbs I could find. I set them up at roughly 45º angles from the piece to each other, which eliminates most glare. Mostly I bought them to take photos of oil paintings. The biggest darkest painting I ever needed a scan of, I had to take to a pro art photographer studio to have shot. That cost me a small bundle, but the photo was needed for a book, and the piece was impossible to shoot at home. It's been used in several books now, so I guess the cost was OK given how much use that scan has had.

This one's real, right?

Glad to hear it worked out!

That's a unique framing spin...

Whiteout and a sharpie! ?

Leave it to artnet to gravitate to the derivative works rather than finding actual creative voices. It actually burns me, not how much of the IP mashup garbage people try to pass off as creative, but that it finds a willing, and receptive audience. It's lazy fan-service pablum, generated to fleece that audience from its cash. It's so much easier to make a table full of doodads with other people's popular characters on it for sale to folks fresh from the ATM. The idea that it's considered art by anyone... makes my head spin. At best, it's an uncreative cash grab. But that's just how I see it.

Not likely. USPS is usually pretty good at keeping things moving. More likely is it was placed in the wrong pile by someone or thing along the way, and managed to stay mixed up i the wrong material until someone discovered where it was, and corrected the route it should have been taking. Given that they handle and deliver something in the neighborhood of 500 million pieces of mail a day, once in a while something is bound to be mishandled/misplaced. Glad to hear like they finally found it and knocked it loose. That's been my experience when something "disappeared" in transit.

I usually have the opposite reaction to people overtly fishing for comments on their collections.

I started a topic last year that had a lot of overlap (in my opinion) with this one, and I could swear the answers were mostly the exact opposite of most of the answers here. I wish I could find it to see if I phrased the question very differently. I think I did, insofar as I THINK I asked whether anyone had ever bought art from a book where they didn't know or even care for the story inside. i.e. Bought the art strictly for the art knowing, or learning later they didn't actually care for the actual book. Either out of a love of the artist/character combo, or a love of the piece on its own, or because they loved part of the book, but not the whole thing. That's a lot of wiggle room. Especially curious about specific examples. i.e. if Brian were to read Deadworld and discover the book itself was "lame" in his mind. or if someone would buy a piece of art knowing the art was magnificent but the story the art is from was mediocre or just bad. I tried to do a search o the old thread and came up empty.

Seeing some of the items on that list made me think of this article I saw the other day, about a family returning a ceremonial robe to the original tribe. One of those cultural/art questions that I've rubbed up against when making art collecting decisions for myself on a couple occasions. http://kuow.org/post/seattle-teen-calls-out-her-dad-s-native-american-art-he-learns-she-s-right

Noticed both of those things myself. But still, always interested when places bother to even show work. Even the stuff I don't care for personally. I learn and or glean little something no matter what is on show.

I love leaving comments about pieces I don't want to own. I love comics, the medium in general, and like a LOT of art I personally would never want to own. I know my own tastes well enough to differentiate, but it never stops me leaving comments, congratulations or even just pointing out the bits of a work I most admire.

I've had several "stalled" packages in international transit over the years. Most are just customs hangups, or temporarily misplaced, until someone stumbles across them again. The worst was one from last year. Sent a package to a friend in London in September via International Priority ,care of USPS. Very long story short, it took a couple weeks of what looked like normal tracking locations, from the US to Heathrow, to customs, to London. Then the next day it said it was in Leeds, then that it was "Delivered to U.K." Not to customer, or even in London, but delivered to U.K. In all my years of shipping international I had never seen anything quite like this tracking path. And of course my friend in London hadn't received anything yet. So he started pestering the locals, and I started the official missing package track via the USPS stateside. After about a month, I got a message from the USPS saying they hadn't found it yet but would keep looking. After 2 months, I eventually gave up on it ever getting there, and assumed it was lost. And then the day before Christmas last year, I get an email from my friend. It was delivered out of the blue. No explanation. Just delivered. And about a month after that, a new message from USPS apologizing that they had been unsuccessful in locating my parcel, and sent the message with an apology. ...so don't entirely give up...

Oh yeah, and anybody speak French...

By making this site, I think you may have just spent more of other people's money than many small governments. What a fantastic tool. I started collecting more than 25 years ago, and after 5 minutes with this thing, I'm already seeing pieces I never knew were out there. Goes to show you can think you've got all your ground covered, and wham.... you gift this site to folks. How great is that?!? By the by, you should probably be charging membership fees to help pay for server space, etc. when this takes off. And I don't see any reason it wouldn't.

Super cool.