BuraddoRun

Hi there! Unfortunately, I can't help you on your quest, but I am curious about it. Have you really been trying to assemble this issue for 20 years or so? Why is it meaningful to you? We probably have different reasons, but I'm also hoping to get art from a (different) What If book someday that isn't great, but means something to me. Mine is Vol. 2, Issue 25: What if Set Had Come to Earth? What If is my all-time favorite series (see my avatar) and 25 was one I really enjoyed and reread multiple times, to the point of wearing out my comic. Unfortunately the artist of that issue, Rik Levins, has passed away, but I've seen some pages on CAF and will probably make offers in the future on some of them. Anyhow, seeing someone else who is searching for a not-in-high-demand What If issue's OA got me curious. I truly hope you are able to meet your goal someday!

Touché. The buyer becomes a seller and can then choose to make whatever clauses they want when they sell. But I already also said in my post that the gallery has that right, as well. I don't like it, but they own it at the moment, or rather represent the owners, so they can do whatever they want. And yes, I agree that present and future owners should have whatever property rights allowed another. And if you open your gallery, I'll bring onions with me so I'll be fueled up when I'm ready to make a tearful offer. Actually I haven't seen your gallery. Is there a place in our profiles or under our avatars where we can link our CAF galleries?

Do many of you make purchases on comicartfans? How does it work, exactly, when someone lists something for sale that you want to buy? Is it a trustworthy place to find art from? I realize it's full of collectors and not a site like Anthony's or anything, but I guess I'm just looking for tips and experiences, since I literally signed up just today and have no experience there. Thanks!

It's too bad this didn't make it to print (ignoring our collecting desires). It looks like a fun story. I really like this page. Nice get!

A beauty indeed! And Marvel characters on a DC board adds an extra layer of novelty, for sure!

I don't know how they would enforce it long-term either. I guess if most buyers honor the contract then it would be feasible, maybe. Personally, I don't like the idea. I'm not an art flipper, and currently have no plans to sell the art I own, BUT, I believe that any buyer should be able to do what they want with what they buy. They now own the piece. They aren't licensing the art, so why should they have to get permission by an artist to resell if they so choose, as well as pay them 15% of the profit? The seller has the power of setting the price, so if there's fear of something being resold for a much higher price, then price it high when you first sell it. But, like others have said, nothing's forced. If a seller wants to set such a contract, it's their right. In the end, potential buyers can choose to agree with the terms or not.

I love seeing the creative ideas that fans come up with when commissioning art. Very nice!

Oh, NICE!!!

...Continued The listing also had this as "Uncanny Origins, page 4" which is written on the piece itself at the top. But what issue # was this supposed to be from? The seller also stated that the artist was unknown, but at the bottom of the listing it said it was signed by the artist, despite me not seeing a signature on the picture. I decided to watch the auction, which had a Buy it Now option, and do a little research. I looked up all the Uncanny origins comics, and the art style did look like the art here. After looking through each issue, only 1 seemed to match up with this in any way: issue # 5, with the Hulk. Two of the characters in the bottom panel were almost certainly Bruce Banner and General Ross, but this page was not in that book anywhere, nor did it seem to match up with what went on in there in any way. Uncanny origins retold origin stories. What the heck does a woman (or statue?) in a transparent egg thing have to do with the Hulk? I had no idea, but I was further intrigued! The next time I logged into eBay, the seller had offered me a discount. I could buy this piece for $41 and some change, and that included taxes and shipping. Even though I didn't love the artwork itself, the mystery of it and general appreciation I have for any fully pencilled and inked page, plus the extremely generous price pushed me to pull the trigger. I planned to hold back my research until the piece arrived. I could look at the art closer and maybe make out the signature once it arrived and go from there. And today the piece arrived. Excitedly, I opened up the package. And like all comic art, it looks much nicer in person that it does in the scan. The inks particularly caught my attention. I'm no expert at this stuff, but they look tighter and less rushed than some of the other pieces I have. Anyhow, unlike what was said in the listing, there were no signatures on this piece. Rereading the listing, it looks like that part of it was a copy/paste job that the seller likely listed on other original art they sold. Really, the title information was accurate: "unknown artist." For the price I got it for and the obvious care taken to make the page, it didn't bother me. But it was a little setback to my research. So I compared the page to the art in Uncanny Origins 5. Yes, that was definitely Banner and Ross, and while they style was similar, it looked a little different. There were more lines on my page, especially in the faces, than in the published pages. The noses looked a different shape. The vehicles looked very close in style, but the tire tread had different designs. Overall, it didn't quite look the same, but it was close, and I didn't have any other leads so I set to looking up the creators who did Uncanny Origins 5. The artist of that issue was Pablo Raimondi, the inker was Bill Anderson, and the writer was Glenn Greenberg. So I searched online for contact info. Pablo Raimondi was easy. He has a website with his email address on it. I simply emailed him and sent him a pic of the page. Keep in mind that I don't have a Twitter or Instagram account, and I rarely use my Facebook. Basically social media, outside of forums, are last resorts for me. Anyhow, I found a blog for Glenn Greenberg, but no direct contact info. I considered posting a comment on his last entry, but that was from December and about Star Wars, so it seemed a weird place to try and describe a page of art. Finally, there was Bill Anderson. Actually, I thought about the editors as well, but Mark Gruenwald had passed at the time that issue was printed I believe, so I decided to just start with the 3 people I mentioned for now. So back to Bill Anderson, I couldn't find much on him either. But I did find an add for a Con he went to and it mentioned he had a Kickstarter campaign at that time. I do Kickstart sometimes, so I logged in there and found his latest campaign...from 2018. Still, I used the contact form there and gave some details about the page and gave him my email address, asking him to contact me through Kickstarter or email me directly. It didn't take long at all for Pablo Raimondi to respond to me. He was very friendly and helpful, suggesting I check with the assistant editor, who he couldn't recall, of the book. He said it was not his art and he was actually curious about the girl in the egg as well. He wished me luck and that trail ended. But not long after that, I got an email from Bill Anderson with the subject line, "mystery art." Bill knew exactly what it was! The page was drawn by his good friend Dave Hoover (whom I discovered has sadly passed away), and inked by Bil himself. He said it was for a Doc Sampson origin story that was going to be an issue of Uncanny origins. He and Dave had finished 7 (or maybe 8) pages total before the issue was canned and a new creative team brought on. The series had been drawn to emulate animation, probably since this was the 90s (1997) and superhero cartoons had been popular then. I looked him up, not being familiar with him myself, and Dave had worked on animated shows as well, so he was a perfect choice for the look Marvel was going for with this series. Before Bill concluded his email, he remembered that he had actually made a post with the Doc Sampson pages on Facebook. He found 7 of the maybe-8 that existed and scanned them in, along with some other cool pages he inked from other comics that never made it into a book. Here's the link to that. The 1st 7 images are from the Sampson story. And yep, page 4 is my page 4. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10202318372255319&set=a.10202224491468358 And I guess that about sums things up! I had a little adventure researching this "unknown artist" from an "unpublished issue" of Uncanny Origins. I got to chat, via email, with a couple of cool creators. I was able to identify my piece, learn the history of it and why it wasn't published, and find out that, sadly, the artist has passed away. For that alone, I will cherish this even more. But the whole thing means something to me now, more than it did when I first saw a simple "unpublished comic interior" listing on eBay. Oh, I forgot to mention that the glass egg girl is Betty Ross, the General's daughter. She got a blood transfusion from Sandman that turned her into crystal. Sampson had an idea to siphon the radiation from Hulk to cure her, and then used that siphoned radiation to give himself big muscles and green hair. Yep, that's the origin of Doc Sampson. Yeah, I'm sure many of you knew that, but I didn't, OK!? Thank you Google and Wiki for filling in the final missing pieces of this puzzle for me. And thank you all who made it through my long-winded post as well! Hopefully you enjoyed the story.

I now officially have an unpublished piece myself, and a research story to accompany the artwork's story. So...Story Time! I started this thread because I had been looking at some unpublished pages available on some of the big sites online. They kind of fascinated me. I mean, serious effort, time, and money were spent to make these, yet they weren't ever used? Why? I wanted to hear other collectors' opinions and see examples they had and hear their stories. Anyhow, just recently I found a piece on eBay that was inexpensive and looked interesting. The seller listed it as "unpublished?", with that question mark. Here is the piece: (to be continued in the next post, for dramatic effect)

I currently own just 6 pieces, and most are blank or just have that proprietary company copyright disclaimer stamp. One of my Batgirls has some very rough pencil sketches, though. It's not much, just the artist trying to figure out the poses he was going to use on the front.

Liefield is one of my "dirty secret" appreciations. His stuff has a lot of problems that can be pointed out, but I still like it.

Lots of talent in this thread. Good stuff! Regarding Soldier, the Blu-ray release of The Outer Limits S2 originally had an unfortunate audio problem on that very episode. Thankfully, Kino Lorber offered replacement discs through the mail. Sharing just because it's tangentially related.

Me, too. Arcades were tons of fun back then. A few still exist, but they are few and far between, unfortunately. A project I've been slowly working on is tapping original GPK artists, as well as some non-GPK artists, to create custom cards for me. My goal is to eventually have my own set of 40 cards or so, but it's been a slow-going project.

I don't know, but classic Garfield from the 70s and 80s are the golden years for me, so these '84 prelims caught my eye, anyway.

I know this thread is a little old, but you mentioned it in a thread I made so I followed your link and read your story, and looked at the art. Honestly, as terrible as that experience was, I think, in the end, you have an AWESOME story and great collector's set of original artwork. Seriously, this entire thing was an adventure, and even though the Dan Green part was bad, the entirety of said adventure resulted in an epic story to share, alongside the unfinished story you purchased. Will you ever make your money back in full if you sell off your 3 Micronauts issues? Maybe not, but your adventure is honestly priceless. Great memories, and great pieces to have in a collection. Congratulations. P.S. Thank you for taking the literal high road and forgiving Mr. Green. Losing his wife had to be a terrible ordeal. You gave him money, faith, and forgiveness. Money comes and goes. Those are things are as priceless if not moreso (can you be more priceless than priceless???) than even your adventure. Good job.

I like the Jim Davis Garfield prelims they've got. I'll watch them and see how high they go.

Nice! Vega is my favorite Street Fighter character! Here's a 3.5" x 2.5" commissioned trading card in the vein of a Garbage Pail Kids card, by Brent Engstrom.

Are there any artists whose art you didn't like when you first came across it, but eventually grew to love for whatever reason? I have 2 personal examples that actually translate to pieces I currently own: Damion Scott and Jim Calafiore. Scott's art is not something I'm normally attracted to as far as comic books are concerned. I like detailed, sexy, and/or powerful-looking art from the likes of Jim Lee or Ed Benes. But Scott did a lot of work on my favorite DC character, including her first appearance, origin, and a chunk of her own book: Cassandra Cain - Batgirl. In the beginning, I just didn't like his stuff at all honestly, but I LOVED the books. Of course a lot of that was the writing, but in comics, the art is part of the story. Cass grew as a character in her stories, and Scott also grew as an artist, becoming more and more fluid with his artwork, which became even more stylized and graffiti-like. So I started to really appreciate and enjoy that art. It became part of Batgirl for me, and I enjoyed seeing it in other books like Robin as well. The first 2 pieces of comic book art I bought were pieces from Batgirl, drawn by Damion Scott, and I absolutely love them. Calafiore, to me, seemed very boxy and flat. I found him when I was reading Exiles from Marvel. That book started with Mike McKone, and Clayton Henry came a little later. I liked both of their work. But Calafiore, I simply didn't. However, just as with Scott's Batgirl, I grew to appreciate Calafiore's work on Exiles. It didn't really change, but I guess I became familiar with it, for lack of a better explanation. I was comfortable seeing his art. Heck, later he did the Batgirl limited series (which was not great storywise, but that's off-topic), and I thought it was cool seeing one of "my" artists work on another of "my" characters, like a crossover event! Now I own a Calafiore piece from Exiles, and I can really see and appreciate the detail he uses, especially for texture. He has a lot of boxy lines, yes, but it's a definitive style that lends to nice detail. And that's another thing about both of these artists: they have their own individual and recognizable styles. That's more that can be said for a lot of other artists. How about you? What artists did you not like at first but find later that you wanted original artwork from?

I'm a new collector, so I've just started with simple, affordable things that I enjoy: my favorite characters, books, and artists. But now I'm starting to save up for some available pieces that are more "grail"-esque. I don't think I could call any one piece my "Grail," (uppercase) because I love a lot of things! But I definitely have many "grails" (lowercase) that I would love to own. But even the cheaper, not-very-exiting-to-most-people pieces of my favorite characters are awesome to me, and I'm proud to own those I have.

Thanks, everyone, for chiming in and sharing some of the unpublished art you have!

How do you feel about unpublished art? I don't mean sketches, but actual fully drawn and sometimes fully inked interiors or even covers that end up not making it into a comic. Personally, I think they're pretty cool and would love to know the stories behind those I've come across. I'm a new collector and don't currently have any unpublished pages, but I've seen some online. Do you have any? Do you know the story behind yours, whether it was redone, simply cut, completed for a book that never ended up getting published, given to a different artist, etc.? And do you enjoy collecting that kind of thing or only the stuff that went into a published work?

Does anyone have any original Power Pack comic art from June Brigman they're looking to sell? I'm a relative newbie in the comic art collecting club, but I'm currently reading the original run of Power Pack and would love to own a piece or two from this awesome series. And June Brigman's art is wonderful. Thank you!