glendgold

3 hours ago, jjonahjameson11 said:

I regret not bidding more on the Wood Astonishing Tales splash.  Based on recent sales of Woody's panel pages from the previous issue, I thought this one would end north of $30K, but it hammered at $21.6K.  Possibly the best purchase of Platinum day?

 

I really liked that piece - I don't know a ton about Wally Wood, but years ago someone who was way more versed in his output said it was unclear how much Wood did in his Doom stories and how much was Larry Hama.  I don't know if that's still unclear or got sorted out, or if that has any reflection on the price.  You probably know more than I do about it.

4 minutes ago, comix4fun said:

What's that per square inch of actual ink on that page? 

Doesn't that equation involve dividing by zero?

50 minutes ago, www.alexgross.com said:

maybe that's what they are saying. but i do think if there was something i could send them other than my subjective opinion, they would take action. i wish there was some simple way to quantify this. maybe if i was mark evanier or some other kirby expert with a published expertise then my opinion would suffice. 

i still might try to compile a list of kirby originals sold by heritage to show that the majority of his work were pages and covers, and that none of these appears to be either one. i dont know, open to suggestions. 

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.

32 minutes ago, GreatCaesarsGhost said:

So these are all fake?

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

1 minute ago, comix4fun said:

WTF does "Signed and Sealed" mean? 

 

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.

3 hours ago, GreatCaesarsGhost said:

I just now found out there was a way to edit a topic, but I preserved my dumbassery for integrity 

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

G

1 hour ago, jjonahjameson11 said:

I get it.  I’m just tired of the Kult of Kirby supporters thinking that he created everything, every character, every style of art, and that he was the greatest at everything.

this thread is about which artist(s) WROTE the best stories, and Kirby ain’t it. Period.

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.

1 hour ago, KirbyJack said:

Jack Kirby essentially wrote almost everything he did for Marvel. Mostly, Stan edited and did dialogue; the cool parts of the stories were pure Kirby.

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.

13 hours ago, drdroom said:

Kirby grew up in the scene that Riis photographed. My guess is he drew that splash without needing any reference at all.

 

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.

On 4/21/2020 at 6:16 AM, batman_fan said:

That’s an awesome image!  Love all the detail 

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

1 hour ago, comix4fun said:

Yeah, there are too many commissions...or not enough commissions there. Depends on who you ask. 

Yeah, where's your Joelle Jones trophy wall?

The Glenabler

2 hours ago, drdroom said:

I'd like to know more about the development of the Kublak character. It seems very composite-y, like the arms of the Thing with the legs of Triton, and a sort of Asgardian shoulder fur situation. I wonder if this was a case of Kirby's assistants or the young Image artists who were around helping Jack along or something. I'd have thought the Kublak was earlier than the Rahmin, but as you say, the Rahmin makes sense in a way the Kublak doesn't, which suggests it came first.

Yes to all the above.

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

2 hours ago, westform said:

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.

2 hours ago, Rick2you2 said:

Anyone have a picture of an oyster?

Mmmm....something like this?

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

18 minutes ago, trimpehulk said:

Hulk 1 pages oh yes I could sign up for this. As far as FF 1and 2 pages I was looking through old CAF messages and one member clearly stated that the last page from FF 1 and 2 was sold to a collector, around 2000. Best Dom 

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. 

7 hours ago, Grant Turner said:

Spider-Man pages, is there anything out there prior to issue #6?

I’ve seen FF 3, 5, 9, and above. What about 4, 6, 7, 8?

Hulk 1, 2?

Avengers 4?

x-men 3, 4?

TOS 39, 57?

Strange Tales other than 117?  What about 135?

Does anyone know any stories about the existence of any of the above?
 

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.