Sal

honestly that staple pull is fascinating. i bet you couldn't do that if you tried

geez, i was thinking y'all are pretty generous. that spine is...well, at any rate i'd be at a solid Good, maybe good plus. Sorry.

fine/very fine. Mr. Adams actually made an appearance on these very boards some eight or ten years ago. scout's honor. he talked a little bit about the fact that they had intended Batman's legs to be flesh-colored on the cover of Batman 244 but that the Editorial staff overruled them. Oh, and he also went into detail on his Expanding Earth theory. which honestly, i remember little about other than i thought it seemed sort of silly

yeah, fine to fine-plus for me, too.

i don't mean to brag, i don't mean to boast, but i'm intercontinental when i - wait, that's something else. i had nineteen of the first 100, which was roughly double my expected total

yeah, this is pretty awesome. such a great run to collect

The "Wizards and Witches" book is part of a series that was sold on TV back in the early 80s. I have about fifteen or twenty of them, iirc. There's some great artwork in those

holy cow guys, take it to the Water Cooler already

what is this i don't even

i've watched this forty times already and can see myself sticking around for another forty

Wrightson, Kaluta, Jones and Windsor-Smith

the bag can't be that old; it's got an area code on it. when did businesses start putting their area codes on their branded stuff like that?

I'm not entirely sure how to answer the question because while professional artists are for the most part really consistent, there are some whose work in specific titles is exceptional, while in others...not so much. I'm thinking of Byrne's X-Men and FF runs vs. anything he's done since 1998 or so. I find his self-inked work to be really muddy and misproportioned, but ymmv. Also, do I consider people who have small contributions to the genre but who have excelled elsewhere? Hal Foster has one original cover credit but his Prince Valiant work can and does go up against anything done by anyone. Also, while i consider Alex Schmoberg to be a titan in the field, I much prefer his airbrushed covers and would put them high enough to make my top ten but the line work pulls it back down again (as excellent as it is. It's just not top ten for me, sorry to all the Schomburg fans out there). So in the spirit of contribution, I'll list some artists whose work I have, at one point or another, just been dumbfounded over. In no order, except maybe the first one. Jaime Hernandez - yeah he owes a lot to DeCarlo, and his subject matter doesnt really lend himself to wide appeal, but there are some spreads in L & R that just make me go "wow!" the man is a master of storytelling and figure work. Wrightson - goes without saying. His comic work is pretty slim pickings past covers, but the stuff that is out there is just amazing. Frazetta - see above. Michael Golden - gotamighty this guy's work really suffers from the awful color separations and cheap paper most of his best stuff is printed on. Art Adams - That X-Men Annual. I mean, holy mackerel dude Howard Chaykin - Really and truly almost solely due to American Flagg! Vol. 1, 1-10. He does do the lingerie thing pretty well though. Frank Miller - All the stuff from basically DD 158 to 300. Russ Heath - I can't imagine what his legacy would have been if DC had let him do some superhero books. Ryan Ottley - This I'm not 100% certain of. His run on Invincible was otherworldly until they made him stop inking his own stuff, which really hurt the quality. I don't know what else he's done but man that book was on point artwise there for a while Gil Kane - a weakness of mine. Nostril shots notwithstanding, the guy was the pinnacle of figurative dynamism for me growing up. honestly my list would probably change depending on the day, and include some of these as well; Kirby, Kelly, Perez, Mobieus, Takeda, Otomo, Anderson, Byrne, Xela, Gibbons, Liberatore, Hughes, Sienkiewicz, Adams, Cho, Schultz, Frazetta, Raboy etc etc

Savannah. Almost every book has cream pages, which for some reason is the kiss of death for a lot of people

the only real benefit of resubbing a red label book is that there's a pretty good chance of an upgrade in PQ. i've heard apocryphal stories that the lighting in the first, original facility wasn't really conducive to getting PQ correct. i know of one lucky duck whose book went from Light tan to off-white, but he's a great guy who should have only good things happen to him so ymmv

outfield of Aaron, Mays and Cobb Schmidt at 3rd Ripken SS Hornsby 2B Gehrig !B Bench C Walter Johnson SP Greg Maddux SP Pedro Martinez SP Bob Gibson SP Mariano Rivera RP Eck RP Babe Ruth DH Bench of Ted Williams, Molitor, Gwynn, Dimaggio, Pudge and Musial. Ryan, Spahn, Koufax and Randy Johnson in the pen

wasn't the DC MO at that time to have them come up with a catchy cover first and then write the story to explain the cover? it's the near exact opposite of the "Marvel method," but boy howdy it made for some, er, interesting reading

Dale - hi there, young feller - is a known commodity. The quality of his books are not in question, and he doesn't really need to do a lot of 'marketing' because people already know that they are going to get exactly what is offered, because he's the one selling them. It's a benefit to working really hard to generate and maintain a reputation. I don't see what that is so mystifying or what have you. Spend a couple of decades buying and selling high grade books across all genres both online and in the 'real world' and you too may someday be able to have a thread reach 'frenzy' status

someone alert Old_Guy. he was always looking for these back in the day

PQ is Page Quality, not Page Color. It's to give a general indication of the quality of the page preservation over time. As the page loses suppleness, it darkens relative to its original color. Technically 'white' means that the page quality is just as it was from the day it was made, not that the pages are necessarily 'white' colored. Especially with bronze age books, which were printed on pretty crappy paper for the most part. Another thing to consider is that "white to off-white" doesn't necessarily mean that the page color/quality is somewhere in between white and off-white, but that both states exist in the book. you could have a book whose quality at the staples is newstand fresh with darker edges and it would get an off-white to white designation. PQ is one of the lesser-understood parts of collecting, and is also the most variable and subjective of characteristics imho.

gotamighty i hope not

there's no telling! old man Lee would sign a sock if you gave him enough moolah!!11!

i'll tell you what's not selling...Stand Lee Comic Book Stand's offerings on Amazon. You want a 9.2w Luke Cage 9 for $549.99 American? You got it! Howzabout a copy of ASM 97 in 9.2w for $649.99? Absotively!! Something called True Believers: Kirby 100th - The Mighty Thor #1 that's in a 9.4 SS slab, signed by Stan Lee...for the low, low price of $799.99!!! Or, just forget about those and blow it all on a copy of Amazing Spider-man #650 9.8SS Signed by Stan Lee, Joe Damon & Humberto Ramos for $1699.99!!!!1! And there's more! An 8.0 Sub-Mariner 69 for $379.99! The Incredible Hulk 122 in 9.4 for $549.99! Hero for Hire 1 in 8.0w for $929.99! The list goes on and on