Ecclectica

Not in the Signature auction, but in the following Wednesday's, this convention sketch that already appeared on the market several times since a few months ago : https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/sketches/john-byrne-and-john-newberry-red-sonja-convention-sketch-original-art-1976-1979-/p/322338-67002.s It's seems HA is less cautious than the last owner who had carefully expressed some doubts about it in his own auction... I would rather say it's a genuine one (with arguments about this assertion), butchered by an amator inker, but nevertheless some elements in the drawing really bug me, like the two cuts in the gauntlet. In other same period sketches Byrne did of the Thorne version, he rendered the gauntlets faithfully with only one cut. See for example this one currently sold by Anthony Snyder : https://www.anthonyscomicbookart.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=87575 Any thoughts ?

About this : somebody knows about Jamie Hewlett positions on NFT now ? (I say "now" because I'm aware of what Gorillaz did 2 years ago...)

Are you an ex- NFT investor ?

I remember other "dirty" shops in NYC where you could find (comics) treasures like "Roger's time machine". Got my hands brown after afternoons there. My motto is now : even if the store is dirty, if the comics are under plastic bags, GO !

Please don't fight.

Yes, until death tears us apart.

"Early Brett Blevins" ?! Ten years after his professional debut ? Things are relative with a guy who has a 40-years career, but... Nice splash anyway.

Fortunately, they don't try to resell everything they've got at 200-300% mark-up, or the clients would become rare...

Great input, guys ! About Kane's admiration for Toth in the westerns context : "Beginning about 1950-51, things were looking up a bit. All-Star Comics had just been transmogrified into All-Star Western with #58, and Gil got a job penciling a regular feature in it called "Don Caballero," a sort of mask-less Zorro in the days when Spain ruled California. Gil rose to the occasion, turning this minor hero into a Douglas Fairbanks/Errol Flynn clone, though "Don Caballero" didn't last too long. Westerns became a specialty of Gil's for the period when they were the coming thing. He succeeded Alex Toth on the cowboy "Johnny Thunder" who had begun in All-American Comics/All-American Western, and then (when that title became All-American Men of War) changed horses in midstream to wind up in All-Star Western-more or less as a replacement for "Don Caballero," if my memory serves me right. Gil, an ardent admirer of Toth, threw himself into the feature, and some of his "Johnny Thunder" work bears favorable comparison with Toth's own pace-setting art. When, in 1970, he drew me a huge montage of various heroes he had drawn, Johnny Thunder was the western character he chose to depict..." https://twomorrows.com/alterego/articles/04kane.html Ray Cuthbert has another interesting hypothesis about the Kane cover on its CAF entry : https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=1298516 "If I were to guess, I would say that Kane was recreating Toth's page when DC was reprinting Johnny Thunder in the early 70's, and that before it was inked the mechanicals for the original cover were found. It's still a great piece, though!" (The fact that this cover was cropped, and especially below at the right as it was for published pages after use, is strange anyway). Maybe the key to date approximately this penciled cover would be to check if Kane signed covers (or art) in the early 50's the way he signed this one. Seems I will have to do my homework !

Great investigation. About what you found on Pinterest : the style of the "Red Ts / Yellow Ts" cropped mentions at the left seems to match the boards used at the begining of the 50's, so this is the original cover indeed. The view of the cover as sold by Hank K, and the more detailled view (Pinterest) matches so... The fact that the cover was not inked is the last aspect that bugs me : if Toth inked Kane on this cover (and that fits, because Kane had most of the time his covers inked by someone else on AAW - Giella, Giunta, etc... - ), why do inks and pencils are not on the same page ? Was it possible to ink on copies ? (We know Kirby was fortunate enough to have a personnal copier, but he was an exception, I think, in the late 60's, because his son was working for Xerox...)

Thanks for the input. Your hypothesis fits perfectly the context for Kane and Toth at the beginning of the 70's. I had this kind of ingredients in my mind (Kane working mostly for Marvel, for example) and it was unsettling. The problem is : you and I didn't see that the "Johnny Thunder" series from 1973 was... a reprint series... Here is the cover in its original comic (I just made the discovery this afternoon...) : So that changes everything... We're not anymore in 1973 but in... 1951 ! And at the time, in 1951, both Kane and Toth were common providers of stories for “All-American Western”, sharing the art shores on the comic… and on the covers (Toth did most of the last ones, and Kane the ones before) So, I suppose either Kane couldn’t pencil the cover after the prelim, which has finally executed by Toth following him, either the covers efforts were routinely shared between the two… Maybe a specialist from this era could tell us.

Browsing eBay, I just came accross this ad for a volume containing reproductions of Gil Kane's preliminary sketches and layout: https://www.ebay.com/itm/126022532878 Looking the inside images, I discovered this prelim: I recognized instantly the final cover for a comic, a cover done by... ... Alex Toth !!! I just had a nice moment comparing the two, and noticing the difference between Kane and Toth styles (faces, knees, etc...) : But I was wondering why this Kane prelim became a Toth cover... Does anyone know the story behind this? More generally, as a coincidence (?), someone told me recently that at DC in the 50's, 60's and even in the 70's the cover prelims were not necessarily done by the same artist. At the contrary. So would it be a common example? (and in that case, can you pinpoint to me books, mags or website that would have done a study on this?) Many thanks in advance.

And we have not seen what will be left of "Born again" next year. I'm not optimistic hearing what I'm hearing... -> "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", anybody ? End of off-topic lines.

And : I don't think the way Adam Warlock was depicted in the last GoTG movie will encourage people to buy Adam Warlock art... We, comic fans, know the quality of the character, but the movie make him look like a real turkey to people outside the comic world... (in the move, I guess we can say goodbye to movie adaptations of his best stories...)

If the movie (the Flash movie here and, sadly, many DC movies... Don't talk to me about Black Adam...) is not good, I doubt value can increase... And : is it me or the value of Flash original art, at the contrary, is decreasing ?

Already put on CAF.

The margins are narrow and the blacks uniform, so I'm not surprised.

IMHO you should send here : - a close pic of the Batman cape part - a pic of the reverse side. Maybe I'm wrong, but with the blacks on the first pic, we should be able to see if it's a print or an original... and then look for maybe the ink effect, if heavy, at the reverse. Of course, it will not be as easy as for a Mignola, but...

I think there are explanations for this. IMHO, one is probably the original comic art field is too young, and too small, compared to the paintings field. One century of life against many. As it is still a young field, we don't see that we are... rich. Rich in thousands of pieces to potentially acquire. Too many pieces still in private hands, in (right or wrong) dealers hands and not in museums. Too many pieces on the market for many to change their opinion that some of the pieces, which are fading for example, can stay as there are, because, there are so many others pieces and so it's not important... The day when museums will have more OA, they will care because they already care about old papers. Would you be fine with a restoration work done for comic OA pieces by a museum, with the same care they already do for other restoration works ? Would that have credit ? I think it has already. Preserve, but how ? Imagine that in one century, Alex Toth, for example, would be revered as a very important artist, a Picasso of his field. I think futures OA admirers would be glad to see that, in the past, some people tried to prevent degradations like fading for important pieces by him. I'm not saying that the Monaco drawing that I mentionned is a important piece and should be re-inked at all cost, but imagine it would be viewed then as a important piece of art. So in this future, I would be glad not to enter the museum, look at the original art piece displayed now in this current condition : ... and, displayed nearby, a fine digital restoration of it like the one BCarter27 did above, with a sign below saying "Here is the piece in its original glory". I agree. It's precisely why I think Rafael Amat had a nice idea in his article in detailling the choice of the person for the restoration work for the Kane JIM cover. Call me naive or anything else, but I would gladly buy this cover in its current situation. It's a fine restoration work.

I just remembered that I had still a screenshot of another early page :

I have a bunch of those, without letters, but they come from later chapters than your page. (BTW, "Colony" is a nice underated work, IMHO) Bob Layton explained to me one day at a european Con that the early chapters had everything on them for publication on his website, and gradually, as the pages advanced, deadlines for his others work-for-hire works, pushed him to letter the new pages only digitally.

Difficult question... If done really (really) carefully by a pro, I would say it's a good thing to have the art preserved. An interesting article about a common example : Gil Kane's own inks : http://artcomicenventa.blogspot.com/2022/10/restaurar-o-no-restaurar-esa-es-la.html (sorry, use Chrome integrated translator) There are some lost causes, IMHO, though... For example, I have told myself that, one day, I would redo my very own pencil & ink copy of this beauty... (Alex Toth - "Hot Wheels" Monaco Grand Prix silent tale) ... as it is an almost lost treasure nowadays...

Ready to listen to horror stories.

That's a part of the "Howard the Duck" movie's storyboard, right ? Who pencilled it ?

The Joker 'Boner' panel?!?! Well, didn't know it but since I can't stop laughing for the last minutes since I saw it, I think it would be a good idea to share it here. Nothing but a good laugh to start a day! Source (and more) here : https://screenrant.com/joker-boner-comic-meme/