bluechip

Ok, will do. And oh, is that your hand still out for the Good Samaritan Award? Well...no No that was tryin' not to engage on the substance of the initial post by keeping it on views that're presumably "mootchal".

Actually, I was hoping you'd just edit the moment out once you were made aware. Sometimes even the best people slip and let a political comment fly. The whole point of CGC's policy is not to say someone's "bad" for making a comment, but to avoid having political comments appear in the first place, so as to to avoid the sort of feelings that arise when somebody makes a comment that is clearly political and disparaging, even if they consider it an "inconvenient truth". Actually, especially in that case. Where I grew up, it was not uncommon to hear someone defend a prejudiced remark by saying, effectively, it's not racist if the people they're talking about "really are lazy", or thieves, or whatever. Hoping you can agree that sort of talk is over the line. But I imagine guarantee you we both know people who don't think so. And to them, a racial slur is, also, just an "inconvenient truth".

I don't snitch. (as a real poli-sci-police-state-boy would've)

What has even fewer limits is politically divisive talk on message boards. Once somebody fires off a straw man remark declaring "what 'they' really want is--" you get people wondering if they should respond to show their disagreement, while others express their agreement by saying no politics is a good policy in most cases but in this case (because the responder agrees) "it's no big deal". Better to have a very strict policy saying it just isn't allowed. Period. And that's what I understood the policy to be.

Love the MMC 46. Had it several times and wish I'd held onto one.

Splitting hairs is okay because in this case you are correct. (Although now I see NiCov's opine that it is a prelim. Interesting). I was riffing off the way some focus on published art to such extremes that they equate a vintage prelim or unused cover to any old commission which might have been done many years later when it wasn't a part of the original creation process and by which time the artist's style and technique had changed or even devolved. If you're a fan of Tin Tin, it has to be more interesting to you that this was made during the creation of the issue(s) you remember.

"From a letter to the comicartl@freelist.org mailing list from ruediger.krischel@t-online.de Dear all, there’s a new record price for a PRELIM cover by Hergé: 2.6 plus fee = 3.000.000 Euro for 34 x 34 cm in gouache!" fixed it

I have seen a lot of foreign versions of comics over the years, and every now and then one makes me smile (like the Peter and Gwen "marriage" in Mexico) or laugh -- like this "psycho spidey" from India. Decades after first discovering the Mexican Spidey comics I heard the story behind them. I'm not sure we'll ever know for sure why somebody thought Spider-man was a thrill-killer. In between those examples I'm sure there are many others I found intriguing as local artists put a spin on the cover, or something was clearly lost in translation. I just don't recall them all at this moment. But if I think of any in particular and I have some spare time maybe I'll add them to this.

It's an unused cover.

That's a subjective supposition so it's hard to say without question it's not true (or true) because none of us ever were literally inside Stan's head. So all we can do is go by what he said and how he reacted to what other's said. He was quoted early in the silver age giving credit to others long before many of them even cared to have credit. As Marvel got more attention and much of that was put on Stan, he did not correct people every time one implied he was the "sole creator" but he did correct them often, and I would bet, if it were possible to tally up all the times people gave him too much credit, that he corrected them more often than not.

That is extreme, but so are your assertions that he did virtually nothing but edit and hype. He was a prolific and talented writer who had to master many genres over the years and the experience and talent prepared him uniquely to spearhead Marvel's silver age. Up until his end times he could, indeed, pull characters out of his hat -- but he would be the last person to say "every one of them was gold". I've never met or heard of anyone who was creatively both prolific and infallible. The biggest problem in Stan's latter years was not that he had "lost it" or was "jaded". Neither of those, in fact. He still had "it" and he was jaded only by the Hollywood method which veers wildly between "development hell" and charging forward with reckless abandon. So while he remained creative and prolific, at one extreme there were some people would question good stuff (or even great stuff) to death, while at the other end were some people who'd say "genius!" no matter came out. There's always people in the middle but they, too, have to navigate the same system. Stan never could completely get accustomed to it because he'd spend so many decades co-creating characters, seeing them realized immediately and then in print shortly after.

I see books all the time that I used to own

Agree. People who talk about "too many shows" often forget that we're talking about entire seasons that can be (and often are) binged in a weekend or even a single day marathon.

The unused cover with Stalin, changed at the last minute after Hitler invaded Russia.

If you open a book to read it, you alter it and then you alter it again when you close it -- "restoring" it to its original state. If dust or crumbs gather on your book and you brush them off, you have restored it by cleaning it. If you bend the corner too much reading it and then bend it back again, you've restored it. Same thing if you put a weight on the book to flatten the bend by "pressing" it. But if you just put the book at the bottom of a stack of books for no particular reason, the same alteration will occur without it being "restoration" because you didn't put it there with the intent of flattening it. If somebody put a dot of black ink in a worn spot on a black field of the book, he's restored it. But if somebody then scribbles in black ink over the same book while drawing a mustache on the face of the hero, inadvertently going over the same spot that was restored, the book may escape being labeled as restored because the mustache hides the restoration under new marks that clearly were made without the intent of restoring the book.

I would be fine with them adding the word "original" if they use the word correctly, but creating another label would compound the problems already created by the colored labels, which may have started with the idea of identifying books which "aren't actually as nice condition as they appear to be" and quickly devolved into identifying books that are, in some purists' opinion, "desecrated" by actions which are "disapproved of". That's why we find ourselves in the arguments posited here, where the discussion is less than it should be about how good or bad a book appears, hardly at all about what's been done to a book since it was published, and almost entirely about what thoughts (good or bad) went through the mind of a previous owner. That has become such a dominant factor that books are judged as tainted even when what's been done was clearly not done with an intent to improve the book but simply is SIMILAR to what other people have done with bad intent. Even though razor thin trimming is not restoration by any commonly accepted definition, I get why people want to call it that -- because it can make a book APPEAR to have naturally unblunted edges, IF the trimming is expertly and subtly done. But then it was decided to put the same label on books which were trimmed so a kid could put it in a folder or a librarian could put them all in bindings. And that's just one example of how some labels make you want somebody to step out of the "Princess Bride" and say "that word does not mean what you think it means."

Even though "production art" is a term that was created and used for decades before collecting of comic art was even a thing, and even though fine and modern art auctions often contain prints, I would be fine with production art pieces being described as "memorabilia". My personal appreciation for them is pretty much on that level, anyway.

There may be a little too much emotion at work here. If people use the correct terms you should not get upset just because somebody likes it/values it more than you do. The headline omits the word "art" and the description couldn't possibly be more clear. As you point out, it says, unequivocally, "Not original art" Prelims aren't "closer to" art. They are art. Just not the final. You approve of bluelines more than you do "production art" even though neither is actually executed by the artist in pencil/ink and the production art is at least the actual PRINTED production art used to make the book. And it's worth reiterating that the listing which upset you didn't even use the term "production art," despite the fact it's been an accepted term in the printing industry since before any of us were born. In this case, the item in question was the actual printed art used in 1963 to make the cover of the 2nd issue of the Avengers. It's oversized, original vintage and frameable. Is it really such an outrage that somebody paid low four figures for it, instead of choosing to pay the same, or more, for a copy of the original comic book? (or choosing to go in with a dozen other friends, all paying the same money, to buy some book from the 90s in a 9.8 slab?)

The ebay has been flooded with so many fakes that it would ne nice to see one or more auction house (or even CGC?) get into the business of vetting the ones that are actually vintage and rare.

when "relatively common" means hundreds of thousands of copies that virtually all people, including nearly all hobbyists would find indistinguishable from the one that sold for 15K. Some hobbyists would agree on the grade enough to winnow the hundreds of thousands down but there would still be tens of thousands of copies that seemed indistinguishable. A few hobbyists who are either top expert and/or purists and/or just arrogant would say they see enough difference to winnow the tens of thousands down to low five figures or maybe even high four figures. But any way you cut it there's no way there aren't thousands and thousands of copies which on a given day, with a given grader, would not be judged as good or better.

And that both are sometimes manipulated.

Naw, he'd go on about Obadiah Oldbuck, whereas I'd remind you that France's "Mr. Jabot" was earlier, and before him was Dr. Syntax, who appeared in a series of one panel cartoons that told a continuing story, beginning in 1809!

Throw away your Action 1s and Superman 1s. 1st comic book featuring a superhero -- Popeye, 1931 1st comic book with new material about a single character -- Clancy the Cop 1930

The first comic book superhero was Popeye.

Love her work. She could do heroes but was unsurpassed at humorous/parody/satire. The only artist who came close to her in capturing comedy on a page was (surprisingly) Kirby.