shadroch

A simple question- Do you believe Jack Kirby, and only Jack Kirby, signed the three thousand or so books that were marketed to his fans as being signed by him? Yes or no? If I sent a DF signed book in for authentication, would you guarentee it would come back as real? If your answer is anything but yes to both questions, I'm not sure what you are going on about.

You keep calling me a liar, while making stuff up . Incredible. There are a lot of Kirby signatures that are good. I own a bunch of them. I also believe there are a bunch of books he was paid to sign that he didn't. If that makes me a person with an agenda, so be it. I'm not an expert on signatures, I just go by what people who know more than me have to say about those books. If someone asks me to get them a Kirby signed book, I'm happy to do it. I have limited prints, I have prints signed by Jack, Stan and Joe. I have boxes of Kirby comics, and I think as time goes by, he will be the most in demand artist. It doesn't change my opinion that he and his wife messsed up badly with their D.F. and QVC type deals.

You've never read he suffered from terrible arthritis?

I quoted where someone mentions himpossibly being cash poor and you continue to deny anyone said it. How bizarre.

So no one was talking about him being cash poor. Got it.

I'm impressed anyone anywhere got a thread about King Comics to seven pages.

If I can't sell wall books and can expect the majority of my sales to be inexpensive books at bargain prices, perhaps I'm better off not having these books to begin with. MCS has certainly changed the way I sell books. I sold two books yesterday for $383. I'll clear about $250 from them. When you factor in prep time, travel time, gas ,meals and such, I rarely clear much more at a local show., and I didn't have to move twenty boxes of comics round trip.

MCS. Nobody uses their website any more. It's too popular.

You are funny.

Kirby worked in Hollywood doing animation for about a decade. Animation paid much better than comics. I'd think Kirby made more money doing animation than he did at Marvel. Why would you think he was cash poor?

D.F. sold some three thousand books signed by Jack Kirby, at a time when Jack's friends have said he could hardly hold a pencil Three possible explanations, 1) Jack was healthier than anyone knew, and signed them in a style very similar to the way his wife signs them 2) Jack was so out of it that he didn't know his wife was signing 3,000 books 3) Jack and his wife defrauded their fans and the public. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the first explanation, and no one ever mentions the second so that pretty much leaves us the third.

I have no problems with it. I use it daily and am just this side of a luddite.

I found a book on ebay a few years ago- Stan Lees weird facts or something like that. It was from the early 1960s and was cut and paste articals with little comments , supposedly written by Stan. At the time it was published, I doubt the general public had any idea who Stan Lee was. The humor is certainly 1960s era and much seems pretty corny these days.

I'm finding this highly entertaining. Most writers work for royalties and I would think Jon Doe probably made out far better ghost writing for a Stan Lee novelty book than publishing under their own. Stan was abused and misused by many people at the end. You seem to be justifying Jacks actions by pointing out the terrible crimes done ,not by Stan, but to Stan.

Or.... Goodman folds his comic division, gives good old cousin in law Stan a job in middle management elsewhere and continues jumping on trends. Flash forward a few years and his fellow publisher is bragging about his hot new property and bulbs go off in Marty's head. He, Cousin Stan and Stan Goldberg brain storm and reach out to unemployed comic great Wally Wood......

Utter nonsense. You throw around words like fraud and illegal far too lightly. I'm not sure how ethical it is, but it is absolutely legal in the enertainment world.

I suppose you think one author wrote all the Lone Ranger novels? How about the Hardy Boys? Either F.W. Dixon is a vampire or someone else took over for him since he has been knocking them out since the 1920s. Does anyone think Don Pendleton knocked off almost two hundred Mac Bolan novels in fifteen years? Did Hal Foster really draw forty plus years of Prince Valiant? Did Stan own the Spider-Man strip? If Roy Thomas wrote it all those years, and if he says he did I believe him, he agreed to be a ghost writer. He got paid for it. It's quite possible that the syndicates wouldn't have published the strip without the Stan Lee byline. The fact you think ghost writing in the fiction world is bad is laughable.

Ghost writing is not fraud. Not even close.

I don't know LA but his Thousand Oaks neighborhood is said to be in the top two or three places to live in California. I do know California real estate prices are always crazy.

I don't know but it doesn't really matter. Was it worth a million when he was signing the books would be the question.

Have I ever attended what sort of panel? I was at many shows Kirby was at. I'm not anti- Kirby in the least, except for when he seems to have engaged in defrauding thousands of his fans. Unless you want to believe that at a time his friends were saying he couldn't hold a pencil, that he suddenly started signing thousands of books. To me, that defies belief. Again, these were not letters to fans. These were manufactored collectibles that fans paid premium dollars to get signed by Jack Kirby. Are you saying Jack didn't live in a million dollar house or that he didn't have an estate estimated at ten million dollars when he dies a few years later? To compare that to someone using a ghost writer is bizarre. I know when I think of Stan, the introductions to those Masterworks leaps to the top of my favorite works. To think he might not have written them is certainly a stain on his reputation. Did Kirby get screwed by Marvel? Yes. Did he get screwed by Stan? I don't know. Did Jack die too soon? Yes. Had Stan died first, I'm sure we would have a very different view of what happened. None of it excuses what seem to be fraud. If Jim Salcrup or anyone writes an introduction and signs the intro as Stan Lee I don't think its a big deal If Jim Salicrup signs the books as Stan Lee and charges fans $50 for them, that is fraud.

When I started buying collections in the 1970s, it made sense to buy just about anything as back issues were in demand and almost always went up in value. I'd do two shows each month and often buy out another vendors stock at the end of the show. I opened a shop and when I outgrew it I opened a second one. Back issues were still a large part of the business. Shows were cheap and dedicated to comics. Now they are expensive and 80% of the attendees don't care about comics. The hobby has evolved so much since then and yet many dealers haven't. Buyers tastes and methods of buying are very different than they were forty years ago, as times evolved, I came to the conclusion buying whole collections no longer makes sense for me. I have a formula that works for me. It doesn't involve buying everything I'm offered. It doesn't make sense for me to buy a run of Defenders from 1-152 when 140 of them will end up in the dollar box with my other mistakes.

I think if most weekend warriors ever did a serious accounting, they'd realize they'd be better off staying home. In my case, stores were closing down all over and I was picking up inventory for pennies. In one situation , a guy had bought 500 sealed boxes from Glenwoods going out of business sale. He'd bought them three years earlier for three cents a book and wanted to double his money. 10,000 new books for six cents each seemed like a no brainer at the time. These days I know better.

Someone mentioned how people with dollar boxes always seem to be the busiest. Is that your goal at a show? To be the busiest, and work the hardest? To sell a couple thousand dollar books to reduce inventory you shouldn't have bought in the first place? That is a way to make money but is it the best way for you ? Someone else mentioned triage the collection and selling half of it at cost. Lets look at that for a minute. How much labor and effort went into working on a collection that resulted in half of it being sold at cost. If you initially bought 20,000 books and after many hours of labor, you sold them at cost, you'd go broke overnite. Now you only sold half of them at cost, after putting in lots of work and then the labor to part them out to dealers- at your original cost but not counting your time or labor. You might have paid ten cents for the books, but you put another ten cents of labor and time into it so when you sold it at the original cost, you lost money on each book. That money has to come from the remaining inventory, so the cost of those goods just doubled. If you bought the books at ten cents each, transported them, stored them, sorted them and then sell half of them at your original costs, you aren't breaking even on them. you are drowning and not even realizing it. Everyone likes to talk about the one great collection they once found, but the reality is most collections you get offered are 90% filler. There was a time that I had well over 100,000 books and am pretty sure I may have broken 200,00 but as I was outgrowing my old storage facilty, I realized I was paying rent for books I was never going to sell. Instead of expanding, I bulked out almost half and used the money to pay the years storage. In one swoop, I went from paying storage on 200K books to in effect having free storage for half that. Many people think bulk buying works best, and can point to their successes as proof. Others prefer to cherry pick. Cherry picking works great for me, I'd rather have two hundred books and turn over ten percent a month than 200,000 books and turn over one percent a month.

Doc Strange was a Golden Age strongman. I have a bunch of his books because Schomburg did the covers but I've never read any of them. On the covers, he reminds me of Lil Abner. Atlas era books had no continuity so I don't think a one shot bad guy would have been an issue.