Skizz

Mr Glass in Unbreakable. It’s what introduced me to original comic art. 

12 hours ago, exitmusicblue said:

It only takes one high-end purchase to open the floodgates...  : >

With OP, I predict it'll happen sooner than later, and he'll be all the happier for it.

So far I’ve resisted buying anything higher than $1,000. One way I’ve disciplined myself is by saying that my first purchase over $1,000 has to be a Kirby page, but it has to be the right Kirby page for me. 

4 hours ago, stippy52 said:

Nice clean setup. Great Job!

@stippy52 thanks my dude.

10 hours ago, piper said:

I love your space. Nicely contained and organized!

@piper thanks dude. I do wish it was a little bigger though. 

4 hours ago, alxjhnsn said:

You are doomed.

 

I know. Last night I came a whisker away from making an offer to dealer on a Kirby page listed at 20 times the purchase price of this page 🤦‍♂️

2 hours ago, ADAMANTIUM said:

Very well done  it doesn't have carpet, so imo you're lucky! As I find that the hardest to clean in my room. You did inspire me to do a little touch up in my comic room  

AND I'm not nearly as clean, it's pretty rugged even! Put up lights in my glass cabinet with duct tape and hung my TMNT poster that I bought for my brother way back in '89-'90 when he was 3 to celebrate him being my born and someone to enjoy Saturday morning cartoons with  

I'll update with a pic in a sec!

 

 

Thanks @ADAMANTIUM 

But I have to admit, I did clean up a little before taking the pictures. 

Agree about carpets. I do like wooden floor.  

Cool statues by the way.

3 hours ago, davebo357 said:

I like it @Skizz, very adult.  Really makes my room full of posed action figures look like a kids room, but if I haven't grown up by now why bother, right?  Always love to see X-Men heavy collections!

 

Also can I just say with this whole corona virus work from home deal, doing work from the desk in my comic room is just way more enjoyable than going to an office.  I don't know that I'm any more productive but just being surrounded by color keeps me more awake if nothing else.

@davebo357Yeah, the desk is a recent addition since lockdown. Being surrounded by art and comics does help with mood when I’m stressed drafting legal briefs.

Sadly, I’m still missing two of the main X-Men keys and those are only going up in price every day. 

I’ve been itching to buy a statue or action figure like the Samurai Star Wars figures as well. But I know I won’t be able to stop at one. So I’ve resisted opening the floodgates on the statue/action figure front so far. Otherwise it’ll become yet another thing I have to spend money on, along with comics, video games and original art.

1 hour ago, DocHoppus182 said:

I really like your setup @Skizz.  Orderly, clean.  Especially the bookshelf with the omnibus books.  Very nice!

Thanks @DocHoppus182.
Given my limited shelf space, I do have think hard before buying any new omnibus and how it’s going to look on my shelf. 

I took another longish break from buying comic art so I could save up. But then I saw this on eBay.  A title splash page from one of Grant Morrison‘s early Invisibles issues. And it was going for an absolute bargain. I really liked the early part of Morrison’s Invisibles run. So I snagged this and broke my vow of abstinence. Wonder if I’ve broken the dam? 

5 hours ago, comix4fun said:

 

HE SHOULD BUY IT BACK!!!!

I have a newbie question. 

I get that “buy it back” is said as a joke here. But I have heard people in the hobby say it genuinely as if it’s no big deal when they have consigned something and bidding is going low.

My question is that isn’t trying to ‘buy it back’ what Mike Burkey did when he was accused of shill bidding? Or am I getting my wires crossed? 

I wish we had something like this in the UK. 

2 minutes ago, Jay Olie Espy said:

If you’re collecting pages written by Alan Moore, then what’s cool about this page is that his dialogue is right on the page. And it looks to be hand lettered, too, which is always a big plus in my book. 

Very true sir. Huge plus to have Todd Klein’s lettering right on the page.

In fact I believe the seller had another Supreme page at roughly half of this one’s value for sale as well, that didn’t have any lettering. That’s the one that my friend purchased and was a pretty good deal for him as well. But I thought the extra cost of having the lettering on this was totally worth it. 

https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1549172

So I’ve been pretty quiet over the last year or so as I took a step back from purchasing OA. Actually over the last year, I’ve been focusing more on collecting key issue Silver and Bronze Age comics. But the original focus of my OA collecting - at least one page from each Alan Moore written comic book - stayed true.

So when a friend of mine pointing out the page below from Moore’s run on Supreme being auctioned on eBay, I pounced on it and managed to get it for a pretty sweet price. In fact, I was baffled that I didn’t have more competition at auction. But hey, I’m not complaining. 

Also the seller was a pretty cool guy. He said he was selling a number of Supreme pages that he’d gotten in a lot. Instead of keeping them all for himself, he figured he’d keep one or two and share the rest with other collectors. Great for me and my friend as we were both able to get a page each. 

So for now the hunt continues, albeit at a slightly reduced pace.

My collection is 100% published.

I think the reason for this is that I collect the pages more as a piece/momento of the narrative and story of the comic, than for the art alone. 

9 hours ago, exitmusicblue said:

If you ever decide you really want to, just ping me -- I have a contact at D&A who gave me a very fair deal on 37 slabs.  Had I pieced them out and sold separately, it would have been torture, and I never would've moved some of the non-keys.  Used the funds to obtain the best OA piece in my collection.

Thank you for the offer. I’ll keep it in mind if I can ever allow myself to let the comics go.

For what it matters, it feels much easier letting the comics go than OA as you can always get the comics backs (usually at a higher price) but once you let go of an OA piece, that gone forever.

Does it matter that I am based in the UK and not US?

I seem to go back and forth, one feeding into the other.

In 2012 I bought my first few pages of comic art.  Then nothing till 2016, when I decided to collect every Alan Moore book in existence, either in hardcover for single issue format.

I completed that objective in about a year and the next stage of collecting was naturally collecting OA pages from books written by Alan Moore. 

Over 2017 and early 2018 I managed to get my hands on a number of Alan Moore written OA pages including Skizz, Swamp Thing, Supreme, Top Ten, Tom Strong and WildCATs and Judgment Day.  This was definitely not easy of the wallet (or balance), although what I spent on each page would likely be considered paltry by many.  But for me it all added up. 

Then I started getting interested in other OA, primarily Jack Kirby. But the Kirby OA I wanted was so damn expensive, I figured the only way I could experience the art in some collectible version was to get some of the original comics. So I bought some Kirby drawn comics like FF 48, 49, 51, 52.  That led me buying yet more Silver and Bronze Age comic like ASM 50, Giant size X-Men 1 etc, mostly in low to mid grades. This  led to more comics and since mid 2018 I have been focusing on comics whilst original art took a back step.

But recently I bought a Kirby Artists Edition and the desire to own a page from Kirby has hit me again.

And it occurs to me that if I sold all the Silver and Bronze Age comics I could probably afford to buy a semi decent Kirby page. But I’m not sure I can. 

On 11/2/2018 at 6:41 PM, PhilipB2k17 said:

If Fiona Staples sold an “Exclusive 1/1 print” of the cover to Saga #1, would you pay the requisite $10K+ she’d probably ask for it? 

I say this a fan of the Saga covers, I’d have a hard time paying more than $200 for something like that.  

I just don’t see how it’s significantly better than getting a first print of Saga #1 signed by Staples/Vaughan, getting it CGC slabbed and displaying that on a wall. 

27 minutes ago, Will_K said:

So... was she impressed ??

Just about. 

But in all seriousness, the effect was just as you might expect from someone with a “proper” art background. A strange sense of curiosity. 

WHAT

It was the movie Unbreakable where the character of Sam Jackson owned a comic art gallery - that made me realise that somebody actually draws the comic pages and the original art must exist. 

WHO

For me, it started with a girl.

I was seeing this girl who was studying art history.  She knew everything about, Renaissance art, impressionist art, Cubism, Surrealist art and all that fancy stuff. I figured it I could impress her by introducing her to the low brow, backstreet style of art of comic art, the one type of art she knew nothing about. It would be like taking a gourmet chef to a food truck that has the best food in town. 

Coincidentally, I happened to go to a local comic mart around that time where a guy was selling some original art. I bought one page. I figured I only needed one. That was some years back. 

I have a few more than one now.

The Daily Mail is the tabloidest of tabloids that tends to divide all things in existence is two categories: things that cause cancer and things that prevent cancer. Sometimes the same item appears on both list.

For those outside the UK, I would take anything the Daily Mail says with a fistful of salt. 

So has the bubble burst yet for WD#1?

5 hours ago, KirbyJack said:

Looks good!

Most sellers would have asked for more.

Yeah. It was the cheapest #48 I could find on eBay on a BIN. But the other copies I saw weren’t that much more expensive either at the time in early Nov. In fact, the pence copies were even less. 

Aside from having a copy of Giant Size X-Men 1, I had never owned any other key issue comics or even read a Silver Age comic. 

After watching the trailer for Black Panther back in November, I decided I wanted the character’s first appearance.

I found the below copy on eBay for about $180 and couldn’t believe how cheap it was.