glendgold

Doesn't that equation involve dividing by zero?

They aren't going to take anything down. I've sent them all kinds of documentation in the past and they've never lifted a finger. I figured that a) "here's the source material that was copied" and b) "here are the opinions of some experts" would be enough, but nope. You're a good man for bringing it up, but nothing is going to happen.

This is a really interesting page. I think it was originally drawn for FF 74-77 but repurposed. There's a very long backstory to this - in short, Jack was drawing the Microverse story with an eye toward revealing the Surfer's origin, when he learned that Stan had already assigned Buscema a Surfer book. If you re-read those issues, particularly the last 4-5 pages of FF 76, you can see the moment Jack had to swerve - otherwise the Surfer was about to meet Psychoman. And instead of whatever Jack had planned, he had to back himself out of the story without much of the set up paying off. In any case, Jack frequently drew stuff out of order and then pieced it together. The color image is from the Omnibus version of FF 74. It shows the intro of Galactus to that issue. The b&w image is the Thor 160 page. Look how similar those panels are. Jack was so inconsistent he couldn't remember how many buttons Thor had on his uniform nor how many toes The Hulk had on each foot. The odds of him remembering what Galactus's spaceship looked like a year or so later are mighty slim. So I think that shortly after he drew the published FF 74 page, he drew at least the first panel of what became the Thor page to keep track of where Galactus was. If he drew the whole page, I think that little ship G gets into wasn't intended originally to travel through space but to shrink down to go get the Surfer. There's no propulsion unit on it, just like the one Reed uses. I'm hoping more pages to these issues show up so we can piece together what the heck happened.

Makes you wonder what you're doing with your life, huh? Me too.

It means "here I am, baby. I'm yours."

Welllll....we know that someone has been keeping busy during quarantine. This is truly magnificent. 51 Jerk Kribys: https://www.liveauctioneers.com/search/?from=alert&keyword=jack kirby&pageSize=72&publishDateMin=1587791189&sort=-relevance&status=online&utm_campaign=SearchAlert_20200423_B&utm_content=matching&utm_medium=email&utm_source=SavedAlert

Thanks for linking to that. I have been tracking the 6 Herriman Sundays from that series - about 15 years ago the first one showed up at auction, hand-colored, and then a second one, and then a couple of private collectors showed off their Sundays -- all handcolored, all dedicated to people, all of them complaints about taxes. Contrary to his normal practice he didn't sign any of them when they were published, which some people think means he intended to later inscribe them. Which he did. So this is an interesting fill in the blank. To be honest, I think the coloring is strong but the subject matter is a little static. But it really is stunning work.

Good man! Remember also that you made me look moderately funny, so I highly support this decision. G

Did you read my post above? Let me say it another way: I've thought about what "writing" means, kind of a lot, and one of the unique things about comics is that it doesn't just mean the words, but what KirbyJack says above - there are a lot of ingredients. Kirby was an amazing writer except for (to my ear, to a lot of ears, and I'm guessing to your ear, too) the words part. Which is a very important part of comics. You'll note that even though I really really love Kirby, he isn't on my list of who wrote the greatest stories because of that issue. Of course if you disagree with there being more to comics writing than words, okay. But I respectfully replace your "PERIOD" with an IMO. Agree to disagree.

Exactly, and this is one of the reasons I left Jack off my own list. He was to my mind the best artist/writer in comics...except for the words part. And words are kinda important. i recognize that plenty of people love his Fourth World books, and cite great moments in dialogue and narration that come down like the swing of hammers -- and I agree - Jack was great with aphorisms and deep thinking, but I am not that fond of the operatic/biblical syntax he uses. Stan, for all of his philosophical shortcomings, did better character work -- sometimes. I'd love to have seen what words Jack would have put in the Silver Surfer's mouth.

Yeah, I like both those guys. Also Starlin and Simonson.

I think a coin flip. Jack did have some kind of eidetic imagry (particularly for traumatic scenes) but he did use photo reference sometimes, and in the darnedest places - I can't remember who found the source for the Sgt Fury 13 splash, but it's a direct swipe from a combat photo. (does anyone remember the source of this: https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1123234) I wouldn't be surprised if the Street Code splash came directly from Jack's imagination, nor if he saw the Riis and had his memory jogged. Of all my comic-art-based time-travel fantasies, one would be to sit down with Kirby in the 1970s and ask him things like that. And if he saw a whole page when he sat down to draw, or if details surprised him. If he saw a scene first, then committed to bringing it out, or if he only realized what he was doing when he saw enough of it on Strathmore. Sorry for thread hijacking, but I just had coffee and it's not like there's much else going on today except more of Season 4 of VIKINGS.

WOW! That's really good - I've never seen it before. I wonder if he was at all referencing Kirby's Street Code DPS.

Yeah, where's your Joelle Jones trophy wall? The Glenabler

Yes to all the above. Also - I don't know what to make of the Kublak underdrawing.

For a minute I thought this was a Bloom County. I'm still not sure it isn't...

This is fantastic - but then again you did get the greatest commission of all time, so the attention is well-deserved.

Mmmm....something like this? (From https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerydetail.asp?gcat=3300)

I've had this for maybe 15 years, and today I was staring it it more than usual and it took a minute to figure out why. What captures your worldview now? Maybe you feel more optimistic than I do. Or less - let's see it.

When I started collecting, Kirby pages were $25-35, so trotting those guys out wouldn't mean much. This is my favorite page that I bought cheap and which remains cheap. I love Jason's work (if you haven't read him, he's right here: https://www.fantagraphics.com/artists/jason/). I'd meant to buy some art that actually had, y'know, things on it, but when I saw this stuffed into the portfolio, it cracked me up. I believe the published version has dialogue in a dark room on it (maybe?) but I like this better. I am told it's actually signed upside down.

Right. Or "right," maybe. If you were collecting in 1995/96, you heard this story: the final pages to FF 1 and FF 2 were available as a package. $22,500. I got multiple calls from multiple people who were all very excited about that. I asked who was selling them, and the answers got vague. One guy was named, but then it was said that wasn't right - that name had been put out there to divert attention from the real seller. Then the pages weren't for sale any more. Who got them? Someone jokingly put out a Hollywood guy's name, and he became The Guy Who Bought The FF 1 and FF 2 Page, even though that wasn't true. It's still unclear to me at least whether any of that was real or rumor. I hope it was true. If anyone else remembers more...

That is a nice Barda.

It's weird how knowledge keeps vanishing over and over now that all the knowledge in the world is preserved on the internet. Never get how that works, but it's pretty consistent. Anyway, all of these exist. Have we seen pages to them in the marketplace? Not all of them. But the only real question about what exists and what doesn't in Marvel's past are pre-1966 covers. No one knows for sure what happened to them, but odds are pretty strong 95% of them ended up in landfill. Interiors, not so much. They seem to have kept all of those. Books that haven't shown up (like FF 4) are strongly believed to be in long-time collections. Of everything you've listed, I'd say the ones I've never even heard whispers about are Hulk 1 and Hulk 2. But I very much doubt they're shredded -- just buried. FF 7 pages are out there and have been auctioned off. FF 8 is complete. TOS 39 has been auctioned off twice. A few collectors have seen pages to every early ASM book except #2, and even then some folks insist they've seen it. Are you asking about every single Strange Tales book? You mean the Ditko stories or are you including the Torch/SHIELD stuff? They exist. Have you look at the HA archives or in CAF? There are pages from (just at a glance) 125, 129, 131, 141, etc. #114, that story where the woman's face was redrawn by Bell or Heck - that one's out there, too. Ditko did seem to get more of these back than ASM work, but the specifics are unclear. If you're talking about Kirby's part of #135, yeah, there are multiple pages around. According to the manifest, Jack got 8 pages back in 1987, which suggests Ayers got the rest. I only know for sure of a couple pages actually being destroyed, and not for the reasons you'd think. The most famous is FF 5 -- the first three pages were ripped so that the top tiers are now gone. Someone would need to look up the specifics in the Jack Kirby collector, but IIRC, a guy who worked in the warehouse said his manager made him tear the pages up to show his contempt for the job. (I know, right?) The story about Ditko using Strange Tales stories as a cutting board seems to have been a fantasy. Back in the '90s, when I was buying my first Kirby art, the dealer offered me a couple other pages to the same story -- Monstrollo -- which I couldn't afford. So he sold them to another collector along with a complete story, The Ghost Rode a Rollercoaster. A week or so after the deal, the collector called the dealer and asked where all the pages were -- he'd opened the package, taken everything out, and only realized the two Monstrollo pages weren't there - along with a couple pages to the Ghost story. Turns out the dealer had spread the pages out in multiple layers of the package and the collector had mistaken one of them for extra padding. So he tossed out four pages. Oops. One caveat about that story - the collector in question wasn't exactly the most trustworthy guy in the world. I'm not 100% sure the story is true, but if anyone would accidentally throw out Kirby art, it's also this guy.

While she was getting this house remodeled, she used to live near me. She generally shopped at Whole Foods dressed like a 1950s housewife with, uh, something extra. Very friendly, nice person and, like most famous people, only about an inch and a half tall.

You'd think, but I can see grapeape's position. Once upon a time there was a piece of art that I wanted - the seller and I were close to a price that was a little above market on it, which was fine. Then he doubled the price because he'd googled me and decided I was rich. "You can afford it," as he said. Well, needless to say...no. And that thing has kicked around auctions ever since, never close to the higher price, often just around what I would have paid for it, and I have never had any interest in it since. PS No, I'm not rich. You'd have to have a pretty optimistic viewpoint on novel-writing to think that.