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glendgold

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Posts posted by glendgold

    ComicLink Summer Featured Auction 2017

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted · Edited by glendgold

    9 hours ago, PhilipB2k17 said:

    Well, aren't you plugged in with the Kirby family? Have they expressed any objections? 

    Sorry, I didn't mean my question to sound coy or anything.  No, I genuinely have no inside info on this. The donation sounds like a very good idea.

    ComicLink Summer Featured Auction 2017

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    It's small art.  It's a lovely cover (much prettier in B&W than I thought it would be) and though it's a montage, it's done incredibly well.  My model for pricing would be to look at the similar Thor 154 and then double it.  Has the FF twice (sort of) and that great supporting cast.  Wouldn't be surprised at $150K+ but the further north it goes, the more surprised I'd be.  Great move, I think, by the seller to donate to HEROES.  Much respect. 

    It's a great-looking auction.  I'm happy I consigned stuff. 

    Grail for me

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

     I did get this at Hake's, so if you go to that thread and see my kibbitzing...or whining...about that the shortcomings of that house's current platform, you can see what piece of art I was talking about.  In short, their closing rituals (I wouldn't exactly call them science --  more arcane and druid-approved than that) seem to depend on them reading the entrails of sparrows and their elders drinking ayahuasca to come to consensus about whether the auction is over or not.  Also: high bid has to be 10% over the previous bid, which is a system only Paul Erdös could love.  But I vented about that already and the upside is that the art is now here, so I'm happy ultimately. 

    Grail for me

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    2 minutes ago, JadeGiant said:

    I will second this request - let's hear the backstory of the search for the grail

    See my reply above.  It's DISAPPOINTING so I'll add just that I also shot a guy, romanced his woman, stole his car, took over his corporation, assumed his identity, traveled the world for many years, learning about Burgundy and fine watches.  Then I stole a dirigible and floated over an auction house and did my bidding from there, and after I won, I had them throw the art into the air so my sky monkeys could catch it.  Other than that, it was pretty normal.

    Grail for me

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    The writing in Howard the Duck holds up.  I've had non-comics friends tuck in, and it's a really interesting 1970s relic, like THE BAD NEWS BEARS or SMILE, satire that's so smart and specific that you can keep coming back to it. 

    And alas, there's not much of a story behind the aquisition.  Got it at auction by paying more than the other guy. 

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    Grail for me

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    Actual grail for me.  I've been luckier than most in tracking stuff down, but this one was a long time coming.

    http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryDetail.asp?GCat=2460


    I've written a bit about Howard the Duck, but since the last essay he's had a bit of a renaissance.  People have discovered the art in a big, surprising way (surprising to me, at least).
    Howard first showed up as part of Steve Gerber's slow, steady process of turning every single Marvel property that he touched into a springboard for an exacting, hilarious, melancholy, dark probe of his own psyche.  Everything from Man Thing to the Defenders to Omega to KISS contained a little of Gerber's neurotic DNA.  You could call his work social satire, and it is that (Gimme a B! Gimme an O! Gimme a Z!  Gimme an O!) but it's also a roadmap of his bafflement at having to live in a world that clearly did not understand him.  The feeling was mutual.

     
    When Howard showed up in Fear 19, Gerber had a mouthpiece already, Richard Rory, the tense, constantly-threatened everygerber (err...everyman) who was involuntarily along for the ride. Howard was just a waddle-on for a couple of panels.  But by the time he landed in Cleveland a few months later, Howard was Gerber's full-on mouthpiece to yell at all the cultural weirdness of 1970s America that plainly bothered his creator.  He started by taking on the comics themselves.  What was big at the time?  Oh, monster stories, horror stories, sword and sorcery, science fiction, kung fu - in other words, the plots of Howard's first five solo adventures.  


    But then Gerber did the thing he always did.  Though Howard was as much a spokesperson for him as any protagonist, he started adding extra pseudo-Gerbers beginning in issue #4 with Paul Same, the sleepwalking anhedonic artist.  To say the stories were personal is an understatement -- even when I was about 12 years old I realized that whatever showed up that month was going to be something I only half understood, the other half basically an argument Gerber was having with the unfair planet.  On came rueful stories about money, gothic literature, politics, mental illness, more mental illness, KISS, the unfairness of journalists, --


    Well, wait, hold up.  The last page of HtD 15 has the first appearance of a villain named Dr. Bong.  #16 was supposed to reveal who he was -- a cipher for Bob Greene, the Chicago journalist who screwed Gerber over in an article.  But that didn't happen.  When I picked up #16 off the stands, I understood by the cover hat the worst had happened, and the Dreaded Deadline Doom would mean this was a fill in, a frequent occurrence at mid-1970s Marvel.  The fill in issue was like inflation, gas shortages, late afternoon speeches from the President carried live on TV -- part of the constant crisis of living.  I bought it anyway.  


    And holy smokes was I wrong.  It wasn't a fill in.  But it was.  It was something I'd never seen before.  17 pages of narrative, but weirder than anything that had yet appeared in a Marvel comic.  Gerber was overwhelmed with work, and moving to Las Vegas, and didn't have time to write this month's Howard, so instead he penned -- obviously doing it VERY FAST -- a letter from the road explaining what was going on with him.  It was as naked a statement of artistic intent as anything I'd read to that point.  Granted, I was twelve, so that's not much of a list.  But maybe that's why it hit me so hard.  


    The issue is a series of double splashes illustrated by various artists -- John Buscema, Ed Hannigan, Giordano, Mike Nasser, Dave Cockrum and Alan Weiss among them.  He makes fun of the Grand Canyon, he compares writers to flowers, he writes a one-page story and then spends two pages with Howard analyzing it.  He parodies fight scenes with a double splash (by Tom Palmer) of a Las Vegas chorus girl and an ostrich fighting a lamp shade to the death.


    Was it any good?  Letters in follow up issues suggested that no, people weren't psyched about it, but Gerber pre-empted them by providing his own critique in the issue.  (Plus marks for the fight scene and his analysis of the Grand Canyon as the World's Deepest Rut; minuses for general self indulgence.)   I wasn't a fan of the issue, but being a fan wasn't the point.  This was Gerber doing a Hail Mary, and I'd argue that he accidentally paved the pathway for all kinds of personal comics.  I think the door to a lot of Vertigo and autobiographical comics opened the moment he wrote, “I can relate to Howard the Duck because he will never become an institution.”  I felt like I'd seen the first genuine artistic experiment in mainstream comics in my lifetime. 
    When the narrative started again in #17, it continued in its month-to-month lurching to whatever bothered Gerber at the time.  Howard turns human, Beverly marries his worst enemy.  But then it felt like it was slowing down -- there's an Anita Bryant deal, a Star Wars pastiche, an issue where nothing much happens at all -- and then a sudden revving up as the Circus of Crime takes Howard on a tour of fleecing rich people.  It felt like Gerber's energy was just coming up again when he was removed from the book.  Though I love the post-#16 issues, there's a feeling of momentum to the earlier issues, and it's like #16 is the warning that it can't last much longer.  

    I have been searching for this cover since I became interested in original artwork.  It was the combination of it  being the ultimate Howard issue and it being a typewriter and it being Howard v. his creator.  This all spoke to me for personal (though easily guessed) reasons.  It was like the adult world was letting me in on secrets about how to be creative and how to live as an artist.
    Gene Colan did a great job.  There aren't a ton of surviving pencils from his 1970s jobs, most of them being just like this -- covers that Palmer lightboxed.  (Jim Warden has the Palmer inks to this in his gallery).  This one gets framed and put on the wall.  Very satisfying to actually find it.  Hope you dig.

    HAKE'S

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    Might want to also address invoicing procedures.  The website says you'll be mailed an invoice on the Saturday after the auction.  Which I planned to use to write a check (and get my 3% discount with).  Just now, Friday, received a simultanous invoice and an automatic charge to my AMEX cart.  I'm betting that somewhere on the site it says this will happen, but not as prominently as the "your invoice will be mailed."  I had to call Hake's to take the charge off my card and arrange to pay by check. 

    But when I called Hake's just now a recorded message said that they wouldn't take inquiries about the auction until Monday.  So: the charge has to stay on my card for four days. 

    So, on the bidding page, instead of that "we'll mail you an invoice" thing, it should say "we're going to charge your card unless you arrange in advance to pay us by check."

    Also, it's 2017.  Two weeks for a check to clear?  I want Hake's to make sure they get paid, but is that really still necessary? 

     

     

    HAKE'S

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    12 minutes ago, malvin said:

    The auctions do "END NO MATTER WHAT" at a certain time. When Hakes was more lower profile, I was bidding on a piece and it was already at double of what I initially thought it would take to win (and at the time 5K was a lot, not that it's little today) and after I was outbid yet again and it was extended for 3 hours I had to really think about that extra 10%, but by the time I decided (which was anyways) the auction was over.  All individual auctions end when the overall auciton ends, regardless of the 3 hour extension is my understanding.

    Malvin

    Wait what

    HAKE'S

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    Congrats to them on their successes in OA.  They've drummed up some pretty stunning prices. 

    Two issues have already been brought up that are important.  First: the bidding increments are lousy.  10% might work when you've got items under $1000 (maybe) but the higher you go, the more game theory you have to get trained in to make a bid.  This can't be good for the results, either, because making such a massive bid over the previous one is psychologically daunting, and knowing how to bid against someone requires that you have a calculator at hand, which is silly.   Is there a reason they can't use standard bidding increments as used by pretty much every other auction house?

    Second: the closing of the auctions.  Holy cats.  I was the high bidder at the end of an auction, and a friend of mine and I had to text each other back and forth multiple times, even after reading the website instructions, to understand if a) the auction was over or not (it wasn't) and if I was actually the high bidder (I was).  The system is Rube Goldberged, and maybe it made sense back in the analog days, when people were faxing bids in on parchment, and it took time to crack the sealing wax, but it's evolved into something pretty inexplicable.  I appreciate the "funnel" analogy, but...why?  It seems needlessly complicated.  And the website isn't set up to actually do the job they want to (there's no clock on the auctions after they 'end', so there's no way to know how much longer they're going to last. for instance).  I'm a bid-high-at-the-last-second guy, but I appreciate that other folks feel annoyed by that, so if that's the way to do it, then why not this?  Auctions end at noon.  If someone bids before then, they're automatically extended 10 minutes.  With every bid, another 10 minute extension.   Does it need to be more complicated than that?  The three hour jump means that those of us who planned to hang out at the end of the auction then have to hang out...again...three hours later?  At which point the auction will end without us seeing the clock, so we need a stopwatch...and the calculator I mentioned. 

    I'd love to see the improvements.  Hake's has so much cool stuff that comes through. 

    HAKE'S

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    2 hours ago, 1Toy2Many said:

    I can't make any promises, but there are two specific things on my list of things to discuss and this has been one of them.  At the very least I'd like to know the reason why it's done this way and, at this time, I don't know.  

    Hey there, 1Toy2Many -- do you represent Hake's or are you someone who buys from them and is trying to have input on how they do things? 

    Has anyone ever refused to help another collector complete a book?

    in Original Comic Art

    Posted

    Are you kidding?  Of course.  In fact, the best possible way to get a collector (or even a dealer) to not sell you a page is to announce you're trying to finish the book.  Just ask my friend DrewinCanada : )  

    Also -- In the '90s there was an Ayers-inked FF book that a collector had managed to get 17 pages of (I think -- might have been 15 pages, something like that).  A dealer had the remaining pages, and wouldn't sell them to the guy, no matter what.  They would get close to deals, and then every time the dealer would raise his price at the last minute.  The net effect was that all Kirby FF prices started going up because these numbers kept coming out.  "X wants those pages, and offered to pay $Crazy Amount, thus my pages must be worth that." 

    Dealer kept his pages, collector dumped his, FF pages stalled out for a while, and, because life is unfair, the collector really needed money at one point and the only guy who had cash at that point was...the dealer, who snapped up the last 3 pages for nothing. 

    This has been your morality tale for the day.