The Less Blob

Not my intent at all. I live in NYC, it is just part of the landscape here, nobody looks twice. Folks stopped paying attention years ago.

cool stuff. don't get me wrong, I doodle/sketch plenty on random pieces of paper. I didn't go three years in between anything "artistic" (not saying you are doodling, that Red Sonja could be a pinup in Savage Sword), just getting the paints out is more of a project for me. I am constantly terrified of knocking over the dirty water container on to one of the rugs we just spent $300 cleaning.

I go in and out of it. I started painting again late 2020 because I was trapped in the house. This summer i went back because I was getting planted outside by my wife unable to move much while she enjoyed her summer at the beach, pool, etc. with my kid. I was sitting in the outdoor lounge of our beach club and needed something to do. I start getting sleepy after reading 5 pages of a book apparently.

Agree on 204/205, but 195 has been overlooked a long time too, maybe bumped a little lately. ASM 172, 1st Rocket Racer as well. And 135. And I know 135 is not a cheap book, but you can still get a decent copy for under $50 if you try hard enough. Ionic cover, etc. if you are priced out of 129.

archie art, even decarlo, was always crazy cheap. I have bought a nice chunk of it over the years, including directly from DeCarlo on ebay. But I don't think a cover. I have like a 5 page archie tarzan spoof I believe from the book below and I am pretty sure I paid under $100 for the whole thing (this was early 2000s though). It is pretty funny and I had the idea of framing the whole thing, but then the cost of properly custom framing them dawned on me and it was like 5X as much as the art cost!

I got into these during the pandemic (2020), but within a tight price, of course, so I never could get a 1st print #1 or FQ 1 within budget.

Hoarding !

I have a question, looking at my 25 jokers up there, do folks think the white backgrounds on some are ok or should I re-work them to have background colors or something like on some of them? I am a little torn and it is always a weird one going back to a painting 3 years later. My goal all along was to mount these on a larger backing and have a really big painting, so from that perspective it feels like a lot of white.

I have been buying them for a long time so long as they were cheap. During the pandemic I definitely bid on some higher priced ($50-100) type archies as well as 10 cent cover price cheaper book lots and won and I bought a pretty nice stack of 10 cent cover price archies from mycomicshop, almost all under $10 each at the time. I just like the corny covers and admittedly read them sometimes in the 70s when i had nothing else. There does seem to be a big price difference between 10 and 12 cent cover unless the 12 center is a great gag/innuendo cover. And I guess that's true for a lot of books. My friend who owned a shop loved 60s - 70s archies because he could buy them for next to nothing at shows, etc. and he would make them $2-3 in his shop (1990s) and while the comic guys didn't buy them, women who wandered into the shop would -- either just checking out his store or with his kids, he only had a few regular female customers -- and he'd sell them out fast. So are you selling them at more general collectible shows, not comic shows?

I think those sorts of books while maybe they got aided by bidding/shopping boredom during the pandemic (heck I decided at one point to chase 40/50s archies, though generally not at that price point), they were not really part of the hot book/key books/movie/tv hype type buying that climaxed during the pandemic. Frankly I am dubious that the Riverdale show really had any impact, maybe Sabrina did on the Sabrina books a little, folks buying those old Archies had probably been collecting a while or had some emotional connection to it

Just keep working at it, maybe do something other than line drawing. Ever try pastels? You can actually smooth them out with a brush and turpentine and it is like oil paint except dries a lot faster.

Believe it or not every stroke of those two was very intentional, these were a little bit more expressionist

well, not thrown together, those two actually took a while each, but there are techniques for watercolors that i am not good at. you have a guy like george pratt (who does some comics stuff) and they are so beautiful.

One of these days I'd like to take a water color course. My technique is self taught and a little lacking as I basically paint the same way I would with oils or acrylics. Would help on the figurative stuff I think. The beach scene was a little bit of experimenting for me, maybe a little folk art feel. My teen liked the other one, of course, Lucifer and such

Hah, just looked on the website for a book a did a little spec on Fugitoid 1, when I think he had NM copies for $8 and I bought a bunch. $83 now!!! Even with a 50% off sale..

I have seen mile high chuck set up at one show in NYC. I've seen him wander around buying lots of times, but at this show he had a small table set up as his base of operations probably so he had a place to stash stuff he bought, but it looked like he was selling a collection he had probably just bought locally and I think he decided he'd try to sell off some of it rather than drag it back home. Very pleasant guy one on one as I was chatting with him while my kid and his friend rummaged. And shockingly enough, the books were quite reasonable as he just put everything out for $2 or $3 a pop and had not gone through them very carefully. Pulled ton of 10 cent cover price books. I have actually bought mail order from him many times. You do need to hunt to find a deal though and the last time I did was early covid.

People come across a pile of comics. They look up their ASM 135 and see it is worth $____, but in 9.8. They decide that, of course, their copy is a 9.8 (and then several other books). They don't have a clue about grading and get back a bunch of 5.0s. tah dah.

I suspect that RMA pressed that book himself, which is why he posted it?

Not that you don't have the best dollar books, but just to confirm, you are the only dealer and then there are a ton of artists, etc.?

That is a cool cover at least

And you had 35 years after that to buy more copies at the same price...

that is cray, what we he/she/you thinking?

All of those books except Eternals 1 were keys or semi keys too. My point is that FF 48 is now 10X+ as much as its initial movie bump had it at. That might be true (or almost true) for some real SA keys now vs. 2005/2006, but not so much for a lot of semi-keys and such.

And most of them still are midling. FF 48 was, for a long time, a book that sold for well under guide. At one time I owned like 6 copies. I was buying them for $30-50 when they were $150 in guide, but stopped because if I ever tried to sell them I could only get $30-50 so I stopped buying the book. When FF 2 was coming out those copies were suddenly selling for guide or a little more and I unloaded them like a hot potato. Oddly enough, while the movie was a bust FF 48 kept on going up and up. Outside of ASM 194, which is also pushed by black cover issues and she hasn't been in a movie yet, although we know that will happen one day, you are looking at absolute peaks on those books (and when was Eternals 1 $3000? Is that the variant or just some crazy outlier? Ditto She Hulk 1, was that really the going rate for a 9.8? I might have been on comics vacation that week.) Those books popped pretty quickly but there were definitely stages where there had clearly been a bump due to TV/movie rumors/schedules and then a second bump into the stratosphere in the period right before the movie/show, and then a dive, pandemic madness books for sure. But if you bought any of them during the initial bump I still think you're ok.

Spotlight 5. Went up for the first movie a lot because it was a dead book before, how has that done since 2007? i guess these are bronze books, maybe don't count. Ditto Iron Man 1 and FF 48 were not super expensive books prior to the movies, took a bump then, but I am pretty sure FF 48 has done very well since it went from a mid-grade $50 book to $150 (when I sold my copies) in 2005/6.