glendgold

I know this isn't going to sound helpful, but I truly mean it to be: If you can't tell whether something is genuine or not, you aren't ready to buy it.

The Jaguar God piece is really interesting -- it's so much the Lion in Winter, Frazetta in his later phase, it's almost abstract, and the bodies are contorted sorta Jeff Jones style. I'm not fond of the girl's face, as it's like an inappropriate peek from another era. I dig it but in part because it's like those really late Herrimans where they get burly and thick and strange. I don't know that it does the job you'd want a Frazetta oil to do, but it's cool.

He had plenty of competition.

Yes, excuse me, that's what I meant.

Y'know, it's weird for me to say this but I'm seeing a lot of Kirby in that Giant Man. The Kirby Checklist credits Kirby with miscellaneous art fixes in this issue -- it would be to everyone's advantage if someone knew definitively whether this page was among them.

I love Adam Conover! He's not wrong, even if that study he mentions has more asterisks than the transcript of a Mamet play printed in The Christian Science Monitor. Also (bringing it back to OA) his spouse Lisa Hanawalt designed Bojack Horseman and she draws hilarious and filthy artwork that you should all know about.

This reminds me of many threads on a wine board I subscribe to. There are folks who believe wine of a certain traditional style tastes better and folks who love more modern stuff. Every day, a bunch of guys from one camp try to explain to the other camp why they're wrong. It always goes exactly the way it's going here. "No, what you appreciate is incorrect!" Somehow that doesn't work. When I was a kid in the early '70s, I always was thrilled when Lichtenstein was included in a museum show because it was exciting to see his work on the wall. I also thought it meant that comics should be up there, too, which no adult agreed with. I still get their point. Now I think two things are true: he appropriated stuff in a way that did not shed light on the original creators (bad) and he made some artistic choices that really did illuminate pop culture and made the discourse about it more interesting (good). I'll probably always be kind of angry about him and also kind of dig his work.

There is likely a slim venn diagram of Park Avenue art collectors and people who want to display work that's been spraypainted on the side of a van.

Not sure if anyone else saw it this morning, but here it is. Note who inked it. https://mutts.com/product/strip-032419/

He drew Superman in Jemm Son of Saturn.

Business model: hope for amnesia.

Does anyone have insight into the reasoning for c-link withholding their results? I can't think of how that could possibly be a good business decision.

Rumple Minze. She's got a harness on her bear, which would mean it's a better image for those of the Neil deGrasse Tyson school of aesthetic appreciation.

In my top five Frazetta oils. I like Gene's list -- I also dig the Silver Warrior. A few years ago there was a pop-up exhibition of Frazetta's oils at the Hard Rock, across from the SD convention center. I went there with a fellow collector. It was wonderful and also kind of weird, in that the painting, in person, were much more varied in execution than you'd think. Some of them looked a little hasty in person but some were even more precise than I knew (Death Dealer? It's just as great as you'd hope). One thing that blew my mind was when you see a background in a Frazetta painting that looks like a hazy orange sky -- like in "Neanderthals" below -- it's not paint. It's masonite. Frank painted as little as possible, in part because of deadlines as I understand.

To Gene's list I would of course add Egyptian Queen and possibly Egyptian Queen.

And here she is: https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/frank-frazetta-egyptian-queen-painting-original-art-1969-/p/7209-93001.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515

Agree that the curators' personal preferences guided some of those choices, and many of the exclusions. Spiegelman has never made a secret of his disdain toward superhero stuff. Wood is an interesting case -- I think if you're building a canon he has to be in there somewhere. But I think I kind of understand how he didn't make this particular cut -- you know that Wood Superduperman splash that's so awesome? You know who did the thumbnails, then the layouts, then added a lot of the background detail? Kurtzman. He's in there both as an artist and as an editor whose work directed Elder, Wood, Davis, et al. My hunch is that with 15 slots, they thought "we got Wally represented via Harvey." I'm not sure you can really boil the list down to 15 names. It's kind of like trying to survive without a couple of kidneys.

Whoever gets it won't be overpaying.

This interview with Walker might be helpful: https://www.aiga.org/masters-of-american-comics

The Mt Rushmore thread made me think about curators' attempts to establish a canon for American comic artists. Probably the most known taxonomy happened courtesy of John Carlin, Art Spiegelman and Brian Walker in 2004/05 when they launched the Masters of American Comics museum show. I looked into the achives here and see it's been mentioned a few times but it hasn't really been delved into. it toured the States in 2005-2007 -- https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2005/masters-of-american-comics/ -- and the accompanying catalogue from Yale University Press https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300113174/masters-american-comics is killer. (Yes, I have an essay in there; no, that's not why it's killer.) Their idea was to pick 15 auteurs whose work you had to reckon with if you wanted to undestand the history and aesthetics of American comic artwork. Did they succeed? Probably about as well as these types of attempts can. It's flawed. But here's their list: 1. Winsor McCay 2. Lyonel Feininger 3. George Herriman 4. E.C. Segar 5. Frank King 6. Chester Gould 7. Milt Caniff 8. Charles Schulz 9. Will Eisner 10. Jack Kirby 11. Harvey Kurtzman 12. R. Crumb 13. Art Spiegelman 14. Gary Panter 15. Chris Ware What were people's immediate, knee-jerk "hey what!" moments? Feininger for one. He was a cartoonist for about 15 seconds. But his later career in fine art made a strong argument to the curators for his contributions to the medium. Also: Gould? Really? And yet no Barks? No Raymond or Foster? Also...well, also a lot of things. Where are the women, for one? The argument was roughly that yes women were contributers to comics history, but no there weren't any who lived up to the requirements of inclusion. (I argued for Lynda Barry at the time, and I think by now her influences have panned out in the current generation of autobiographical comics folks, but hey that's just my opinion, man.) Also it's interesting that the first half of the list is all strip and the second half all comic book. I can see the reason for that. You'll note there's just one superhero artist. And Kirby wasn't even a lock. I think the curators saw the superhero genre as a thin slice of the pie. When the art was on the walls of the Hammer Museum and MOCA, it was incredibly impressive. Moving. I hadn't understood why Frank King was included until seeing the art in person. Also, it made me think about the definition of a canon not being "stuff I like" but people whose contributions to the form were crucial to its development. But I dunno, what do you think? Is this an acceptable canon still? G

Someone smart with Photoshop should go about making these Mt Rushmores.

I think if you start with Kirby, Eisner, Moebius & Crumb (my picks this morning) and give it some time you eventually get Miller. The influences might not be obvious (except Eisner) but I think the other three offered a lot of freedoms that Frank ran with, including anger.

My favorite John Buscema story is Marvel Spotlight 30, the Warriors Three issue. Totally classic in execution, drama and humor. Also: never seen a page to that issue, but I recall the cover showing up, all stained and in terrible shape, waaaaaay back in the '90s.

John Buscema is the Gene Colan of Buscemas.

I saw Byrne's notes for X-Men 150 -- the arc he planned to do if he had stayed. X-Men vs. Ultron. Who knows what that would have been like.