glendgold

Good ol' Sterankok. 

On 7/21/2021 at 11:25 AM, fenip said:

btw these are images from the press kit.  Some very good pieces can't be shared because of copyright issues...

These images are amazing and i'm going to look at them for a while. I'm unclear on what issues you mean, however. Why can't some pieces be shared?

The Ditko covers that have come up for sale so that unwashed people like me know about them are #11, 28 and 30.  The first two are especially cool but they aren't going on a top 20 list.

The Sinnott family has some FF 51 interiors, but not the splash - that's in a private collection. Joe also held onto the FF 95 interior splash with the Thing holding up the building. 5 stars, but not a top 20 piece.

17 minutes ago, stinkininkin said:

Probably slightly controversial, but I would probably put the cover to Silver Surfer 4 in the mix. And I think the cover to 4 trumps the cover to SS 1, but fair minded people might disagree.

Who are these "fair-minded people" to whom you refer? BRING THEM TO ME.

4 > 1

Crumb Zap 0

But that Frazetta WSF 29 rules over the rest. 

As a Kirby guy, I very much want something by him to be in that top ten, but 90% of his A+ stuff is still missing.

And are we just doing books? Because there are strips. The McCay Walking Bed is out there, which should make the list.

Here's a special one. You get a photocopy of 1/2 of Jack's Demon Heimdall model sheet as well as a Steranko Branko photocopy of a piece that Joel Thingvall owns.  I have always loved Branko's work and find his suggestion of a swinging holiday not at all creepy. 

https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/original-pencil-drawings-jack-kirby-branko-145-c-B044617993

Fun trivia about this cover: if you hold it up to the light you can see that the white out is covering up how Jack originally drew Doom holding a stick of dynamite. 

7 minutes ago, Bill C said:

I don't know that it works like that, although it does seem logical in theory.

But yeah, for instance say if I was into the full silver age Green Lantern run (instead of just the first 20 issues) like I am with The Flash, then I would be all over those later silver age issues with art by at least one of those guys you mentioned (I forget which- which goes to show you the stuff isnt super memorable).

I dunno, I kinda thought, maybe, the way the art, y'know, looks might have some impact on whether you wanted to, uh, look at it, but you can all just okayboomer me out the door if necessary.

1 hour ago, Ecclectica said:

A little help would be appreciated to eradicate this one definitely...

https://www.ebay.fr/itm/265185378472

It keeps coming back every month, despite severals "Out !".

One reference, among others : http://www.spidermancrawlspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/podcast514taketwo.jpg (short version of this url to fit into the Ebay form with your comment : https://bit.ly/3wVMykE )

C'est dégueulasse!

Also, it's very nice that you're reporting it, but ebay couldn't give a flying intercourse about fraudulent artwork. This will keep showing up for the rest of our lives, so the best thing to do is just try to tolerate it and learn to live with it. Like herpes. 

3 hours ago, Timely said:

And why are they all levitating off the ground?

and why is Captain America punching the air?

and why is Spider-Man about to fall on his head?

and why is Iron Man’s feet so small?

and why are the Thing and Dr. Strange just standing there?

and how can the Human Torch turn on a dime at a 90 degree angle?

and when will Thor finally cut his hair?

and when will anybody notice the Invisible Girl? Or is she a woman now?

and for that matter, where is Mr. Fantastic? Is he really the Sub-Mariner in disguise? That would be a stretch!

This is one of the most curious Kirby pin-ups I've seen. Almost every character's pose, separately, would be cool corner box art, but when you see them together they make a strange repetition of form (see how The Thing and Thor are bookending each other? There's a lot of that). Esquire must have given him some oddball art direction. And I think that's a Marie Severin Hulk face.  HA seems to have dropped the Sinnott inks attribution.

15 hours ago, Ryanfromottawa said:

Thanks, I just ordered it! I’m a big Stan Fan. It’s a shame to hear about his mistreatment. I just read up regarding the allegations against Max..... geez 

Hope this isn't behind a paywall. If so, short version is: Stan's a simple guy; legacy is complicated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stan-lee-true-believer-review/2021/02/18/5e9f4fc4-71e4-11eb-b8a9-b9467510f0fe_story.html

3 hours ago, stinkininkin said:

Not certain on ALL the Stan Lee signed art being auctioned here, but a lot of them are from Stan's handler Max Anderson's collection. He was a controversial figure (to put it in extremely charitable terms) during the final years of Stan's life, and having access to Stan on a 24 hours basis for all intents and purposes facilitated so much of this signed art. There are many layers to this story that I won't get into, but these Stan signed pieces of art tell an interesting tale in and of themselves.

Ah. That would explain why everything is signed within the margins. If you want to know more about Max Anderson, read the bio of Stan by Abraham Reisman that came out this year: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612238/true-believer-the-rise-and-fall-of-stan-lee-by-abraham-riesman/

1 minute ago, Will_K said:

A while ago in another topic, a Stan Lee signature is an automatic turn-off for me.

This is exactly what I say in my Tinder profile.

On 5/14/2021 at 4:20 PM, pemart1966 said:

It had nothing to do with "genius" - it was no doubt a simple matter of economy.  He didn't waste time drawing face detail if he could help it.  That takes time and time is/was money.  With the amount of pages he was pumping out you can hardly blame him.

Mmmm...I'm not 100% sure how much time he saved on this particular page by not drawing Thor's face. What do you think?

Here are some no-face Thor examples. There are plenty of others. I feel like he was doing this on purpose but I have no idea what it was. Since Jack grew up beating the daylights out of other guys,  and in adulthood saw all kind of hand-to-hand combat, I always look for what kind of experience he brings to fight scenes. Battle being so intense it overwhelms your identity?  No idea.  But it's a motif for some reason.

Wait, how many fists? 

https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/harvey-kurtzman-two-fisted-tales-18-cover-original-art-ec-1950-/p/7244-255001.s?ic4=ListView-Thumbnail-071515

5 hours ago, J.Sid said:

Here is why it's tough to discuss this without seeing the actual page. Below are two pages from the issue (NOT saying either one is the page this thread is about). 

Both are 5-panel all-out action pages from Thor 126. The one on the left is likely a $25k page, the other is not even close.

• One has Thor's face in several panels. One doesn't show his face in any panel.

• Thor swinging his hammer > Thor punching  (there are collectors who would not be interested in the 2nd page because Mjolnir is not on it.)

 

 

 

 

 

Right! And the page to the right was one I was going to post once I shook off my general jaded laziness. That's what I mean about Thor's face. For some reason, Jack would do that in fight scenes - not necessary showing him from behind, just having his face obscured, for multiple panels. There are plenty of other examples and I'd post them but see sentence #1.

Having just taken a swing through the book to see what you're talking about, the action is pretty great, the inks are pretty awful (I am not an automatic Vinnie basher -  I have a couple of 5-star Thor pages he inked), and it's a classic issue but holy cats there shouldn't be a premium on the art just because the logo changed. The question I have is whether this is one of those pages where Jack chose, for whatever reason to not show Thor's face. I've noticed in Thor battle pages, in particular, Jack often kept us from seeing his expression. No idea what was up with that (genius is hard sometimes) but he did it in this issue a few times. That would impact my valuation.

Cool pieces. I've seen a couple of those progressives over the years, but few silver age hand colored pieces like that.  No opinion on price, but a couple of questions - is that hand colored piece water damaged? Looks like the top and logo are bleeding. And is that Romita's signature or Stan Goldberg IDing the artist?

When I saw that image, I thought, "Wow, George Lucas would like this."

43 minutes ago, bluechip said:

AIUI (inventing a new acronym for "as I understand it") the origin pages for FF1 do exist and were obtained by a collector who bought them as pages from FF Annual 1.  Reportedly some figures were redrawn for that issue  directly over the original artwork (!).   

As for the theory, I tend to favor your conclusion that it's based on too much coffee.

That said, I expect it to become the new Great Truth amongst the most ardent Kirby acolytes -- to whom Kirby is not just King but God and Stan is Satan.  

Upon further examination your theory quickly becomes mind-boggling.  Did the FF spring whole cloth from Kirby's head, like (whomever it was; I can't recall) from Zeus?   And if so how come Jack never bothered to say he'd just written and illustrated an origin story with no input whatsoever?  Shirley, it should have occurred to Him to say so sometime during his later protestations about His creative input?   Is it possible he did that... and then forgot?!  And if he was capable of forgetting something that big and which he cared about that much, what else might he have forgotten?  Such us... that he'd had a conversation with somebody about the story, or had even read an outline.   

The most fundamentalist Kirbyists will have no trouble reconciling those contradictions, at least in their minds.  (And -- of course -- in massive posts on message boards)

    

 

Yeah, that's not where I was going with it at all.  I have a friend who is very good at teasing out threads of who-did-what, and as he's an artist and writer himself, he made a point that folks who haven't done a lot of artistic collaboration tend to be way more absolutist than folks who have.  When two people work together, there's a third artist in the room, some kind of angel that make the finished work have an integrity it wouldn't otherwise have.  I recognize the impossibility of parsing the nuances, even if you had a camera and tape recorder going at the time it was all getting worked out. 

Anyway, this came up because of something Tom Brevoort was examining, and it spells out a possible way FF 1 might have been composed:

https://tombrevoort.com/2020/05/24/lee-kirby-more-thoughts-on-fantastic-four-1/

3 hours ago, comicwiz said:

I have two examples, non-superhero, but one actually gives story/layout direction and -------script over 3 pages, the other is straight caption -------script that was written on an area of the page that was covered with a stat (I only noticed it the other day when the stat peeled off while scanning the page). When you read the -------script/caption, you can practically hear Stan Lee's voice. It's him, no question, and the page is not only credited to him, but signed by him as well. It's also from Dec 1960 based on the CCA approved rubber stamp on the back, which means the page was worked on earlier, and even if going by the approved date, is nearly an entire year before FF #1 was published. So I was really more curious about pages where Stan wrote in notes showing the method he popularized, not necessarily for any specific artist and what the earliest one would be. And whether in anyone's experience, such pages experience any value enhancement. I know for instance his signature would add value to a page, and people have a pretty standard way of assigning value in those instances, but wasn't sure if the same would occur with his handwritten notes. 

Can you post these examples? They sound fascinating. And if I understand what you were looking for, I'd say I always assumed that Stan didn't write in notes when it was Marvel Method - that there was a verbal story conference, the artist drew it, and then Stan's contribution would be to write the narration directly in the dialogue balloons; no notes necessary.  Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong.

I reviewed that Reisman book for the WaPo, and really enjoyed it. I think for, uh, dedicated folks like ourselves its analysis of what Stan actually did doesn't turn up much new information, but it does get all the evidence that's been scattered around in between two covers, so that's useful.