bluechip

A couple more I came across with anachronistic babes, both as tigress and woman-in-peril

Ok, I getcha. I many not be the best at identifying these items because I am generally surprised at what people are willing to pay for things that don't appeal to me and I am less often surprised at how little something goes for. The more recent stuff concerns me because even when I like the end result the OA that remains is less appealing because of the process that leaves it with less shading, no word balloons or other text and even without pencils. So while the published cover itself may stand alone as a piece with or without nostalgia, the OA feels more than similar pieces which had more onus on them to be aesthetically appealing even in the not-yet-final form.

There are too many examples of bad art, and who wants to spend time looking at bad art? Maybe if you focused in on bad art that still somehow sold for a lot of money, it would be more interesting... at least to me. But of course that way lies madness, and by madness I mean the potential anger of people who paid a lot for it (or have lots of it to sell) and don't appreciate it being called "bad"

Privacy as a motive for silence makes sense until you consider that he posts all the time here about having books. Fear of Robbery also makes sense until, again, if you're saying publicly you have a lot of valuable books, your average robber isn't going to make a decision to rob or not to rob based on the presence of some particular books in particular grades. The words "valuable comics" are all the robber needs. So what else could it be. Well, if Mitch publicizes what books he has then he's gonna know that if and whenever he puts any up for public sale, he will have to do so knowing people's response to that knowledge is mercurial. Sometimes people on the boards will heap praise on books in the apparent desire to see them get high bids. And sometimes the consignors might as well have smeared gravy on the books and thrown them into a pack of ravening wolves. So, for all the reasons one might wish to hold books close to the vest, that one makes the most sense to me.

Sometimes when a guy accuses people of beating a dead horse you gotta point out that the guy posting the gif is the one who keeps draggin' that horse into place it is not supposed to be.

Yeah. Even the books they reprinted from Marvel would often feature covers with the original images retouched or virtually painted over to make everything more garish, the women with more revealing clothes, the victims' facial expressions more terrified and the villains more monstrous.

Went through a stack of Mexican Marvels from the 70s and was reminded that, while in the Marvel comics Nick Fury was so torn up by Pam Hawley's death that he barely touched a dame for the rest of the war, in the comics made for the Mexican audience, Nick had plenty of "live for today because tomorrow we may die" sex with a slew of hot babes, friend and foe alike. Sometimes Hitler himself would play cupid with a Hotzi honey trap. I am not privvy to the MCU plans for any wartime Sgt. Fury/Howlers exploitation, but they could do worse than adopt the 70s drive-in movie tone of these Mexican adaptations.

Sometimes you gotta let a bear know that what he's doing on the board he should be doing in the woods.

Is this an attempt to reference and give shade to the "...you didn't build that..." argument in which people sometimes point out that things like roads and other infrastructure, subsidies, laws and courts and military and police protection make it possible for things to be built by making it safe and economical to do so? And, if so... why? (not to mention how tf does it supposedly apply to this topic?) "No politics on this board" is something agreed to and practiced by 99.9% of the folk who are on it. Hoping this is not an attempt to inject something obliquely as that would no less undermine and flout fellow boardies who respect the rule.

I'm happy to see anything that's actually scarce to rare get some financial lovin', but like many folk here I could probably rattle off many things which would bring vociferous cries of "It ain't worth that!!!", despite being just as rare (if not much more so) and far more culturally significant (even, like, many thousands of times more so).

The ultimate comeback. No matter what the other person says, if your reply begins with "Your face--" you win.

I am not sure what the logic is here. I see talk here of the Detective 140 going for 250K. So if the first appearance of Batman goes for 4X the first appearance of the Riddler, that must mean the buyer of the first Batman is a "Newbie Speculator" who just doesn't realize he should be buying the Riddler's debut instead? Or maybe you feel it will fall that way because all the Seasoned Intelligent Collectors" already have their copies of Detective 27? Or that no Seasoned Collector would ever bid on ANY 5.0 book when there are higher graded books to bid on?

This list accumulated over time, and I was both aghast and amused that I couldn't find enough words to narrow the search down to a manageable number of results. So, yeah, it was not scientific or meticulous.

A "boolean" search that employs a "-" to exclude things you don't want included in your results. On ebay, such a search is increasingly difficult to concoct. If you want to find something truly unique, or rare, or even just precise, it seems that no matter how many words you exclude, some sellers will find ways to pollute your results with their drek. I recently discovered, however, that ebay allows more words than it used to allow in searches, which means more words you can exclude. But I don't seem to be able to exclude enough words to come up with a list that is anything less than virtually limitless (and yeah, I know the concepts "anything less than" and "virtually limitless" are kind contradictory, but I am too busy creating the perfect search to worry about the perfect sentence complaining about same). Here is one I typed in recently looking for rare things and it narrowed 100K+ results of mostly brand new down to a few thousand results of mostly brand new . -repro -reproduction -sexy -acetate -chromium -9.8 -nm -9.6 -9.4 -9.2 -print -printing -reprint -pre-order -new -dealers -homage -mint -adults -studios -prism -variant -exclusive -run -printed -facsimile -signed -photocopy -sealed -convention -incentive -store -sexy -mature -collectible -limited -copies-chromium -9.8 -nm -9.6 -9.4 -9.2 -print -printing -reprint -pre-order -new -dealers -homage -mint -adults -studios -prism -variant -exclusive -run -hardback -printed -facsimile -signed -photocopy -sealed -convention -incentive -store -sexy -mature -collectible -limited -9.9 -copies -10.0

In the USA Marvels, Nick Fury had only one woman during the war and barely touched a couple more. But in the Mexican version of "Sargento Furia y Sus Commandos", smoking babes were on the front lines a lot more. And they liked that Nick. But Sarge wouldn't abide any skirt from the wrong side of the fight, even if she was a "Hotzi"

I had dinner there and they let me take a menu as souvenir. Not sure what became of it...

In this foreign edition, Spidey is apparently a cop killer.

Just realized there are THREE 1970s Howard covers in this auction. For years there, nary a one showed up.

Totally agree. Might argue that the difference should not be 100s of thousands of dollars, especially if someone could buy it with "newer" staples and then just replaced the replaced staples with vintage ones. But the market is what it is. Slabbing should provide as much information as possible, the idea being not to encourage deception, or emotional responses based on the presumption of it, but to remove the buyer's fear of deception and to provide detailed, verified information what was (and just as importantly what was not) done to a book.

Rarely does a piece sum up a character this well in one image/page. You would get what this was about even if you'd never heard of the Sub-mariner before you saw it.

It could be said that "The Marvel Method" made the creation of comic book stories more like the creation of movies and TV shows, which were already more collaborative in the 60s and have become more collaborative in recent years. And, as in films and TV, credits will not always reflect every single contribution. Directors change lines and action all the time, but must prove they have made enormous changes in order to claim a writing credit. And no matter how much a writer's description indicates directorial choices (be it a simple line that reads "dolly to close up" or a page of meticulously choreographed action) the writer will never get a director's credit. Just as an actor may recommend half the other actors who are hired but that will not earn them a credit for Casting. So the credits are generally decided beforehand, which is good to the extent it incentivizes collaboration and disincentivizes meaningless changes in the name of credit-grabbing. Sometimes, of course, it just evolves naturally to the point where one person eventually does so much that their credit evolves as well. Which is how the FF credits evolved from "Written by--" and "Drawn by--" to "by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby" and, even more simply, "Stan & Jack"

I have seen margin notes that clearly indicate the pages changed hands multiple times, going back and forth between Stan and the artist (and other production people) like a memo chain, with Stan literally asking questions and the artist answering them, all in the margins.

That I would like to see.

As a "process geek" I have always found it interesting to look at the revisions and margin notes, etc. I remember seeing Stan's doodles on the backs and in the margins of several pieces of art. FF 3 comes to mind, but I don't have a scan. Found a couple others, though. Amazing Spider-man 96 cover prelim stat with a very rough drawing of the Goblin pasted over it. And the back of a Thor page (same page someone pictured above, wherein Thor raps with some hippies. Stan didn't care for Kirby's depiction of the hippies, which he though looked "too old" (per the margin notes) and then apparently doodled samples on the back as a guide for Herb Trimpe, who did the final hippie images, perhaps because Kirby was busy and/or because Trimpe was young and considered one of the more "with it" artists in the bullpen.

I didn't mean to imply that you were going that way with the theory. I just imagined Kirby Extremists glomming onto it and that got me thinking about how they might reconcile anything that didn't add up the way they wanted. I like the concept of the Third Angel in the room. Makes me wanna steal it as my own observation. Instead I will say it's a Third Creative Spirit in the room. Yeah, that works. It's mine now.