Ted_L

Yeah thankfully my marriage is very solid, but after a friend's recent divorce I was thinking about what a disaster it would be to try and value and split the art acquired during the marriage. Hopefully I'll never have to deal with that!

I've kept a spreadsheet of my collection for over 20 years now and I find it extremely useful. Columns are: Primary Artist (usually penciler), Inker, Description (usually comic issue or name of strip), Page # (or Date if strip art), Purchase Price, Purchased From, Purchase Date, Sold Price (if relevant), Sold To (if relevant), Sold Date (if relevant), Notes / Comments I enter the artist names as Last Name, First Name and generally keep it sorted by artist name. I've been color coding the rows as black (default) for art I currently own, green for art I've sold and red for art that I've purchased, but hasn't arrived yet. If creating the spreadsheet now, I'd probably just add another column with a drop-down for the status. Excel gives you a lot of flexibility when analyzing the data. For example, I keep a yearly summary in a different tab of total purchase amount, total sold amount and net expenditure for the year. This also makes it easy to sort by purchase date when trying to choose relevant pieces for the Best of Year/Fave 5.

I'm supporting the following comic related folks on Patreon at the moment: Bob McLeod -- he only has 11 Patrons and could probably use more support Peter David -- I'm a longtime fan, but he doesn't seem to be posting too much recently Ted Rall -- Somewhat controversial cartoonist and columnist. Lots of content, but definitely not everyone's cup of tea. I'm still reeling from the passing of Steve Lightle, who was active on Patreon for years. Any recommendations for other 70's/80's/90's comics creators who deserve support?

$6K, but that was over 15 years ago. I'm thinking this would probably be around 40-50K now?

I briefly owned this splash from #17 back in 2005, but resold it because I didn't care for the Chic Stone inking. One of my many regrets

Published in Bizarre Adventures #27 in 1981 along with a Jean Grey story penciled by John Buscema and an Iceman story penciled by George Perez. Definitely worth checking out.

I'm loving this Cockrum thread!! Scans from X-Men #107 and the original cover art to the X-Men/Alpha Flight trade paperback (which was re-inked before publication). I no longer own the X-Men/Alpha Flight art.

We need Albert on to represent us Mets fans

I wasn't too thrilled when they moved the weekly auctions from Sunday to Monday, but it didn't seem to have much impact on price. I doubt this will either, except potentially for the first week or two until people get used to it. Since the weekly auctions start with original art, I would think the starting time would stay the same, so not much impact there. On the plus side, this should enable them to include more art in the weekly auctions going forward. Pricing is so crazy right now that selling via auction is really the only way to get a good gauge of "fair market value".

I really appreciate that they went through 10 rounds in about 45 minutes, especially since 2PM EST on a Sunday isn't the most convenient time. That's particularly going to be tough over the summer between outings, barbecues, etc. I dropped off before the "bonus" round, so I'm not sure exactly how long that ran for. I like Bechara's matter-of-fact style and while there were no huge bargains, a lot of his art was fairly priced. Glen will probably need to start a bit lower in the future to generate more interest. I think the show will benefit if they keep it short and don't play up the competition too much, to keep it different from Dueling Dealers. I do think there is room for both shows. To me Dueling Dealers is now both a sales show and an entertainment show. I'll watch it even if I'm not buying anything to see the memes, Sharon's cakes and the assorted wackiness from Mike and Anthony, not to mention Harpies. Dueling Dealers is not just selling art, it's also bringing viewers to the CAF channel and helping to build the brand (plus increased visibility for Anthony and Mike and the amateur dealers). I also really love the day/time for Dueling Dealers. I'm on the East Coast and it's at a perfect time for me to relax and get my weekly art fix.

I like Bechara (and his taste in art), so I'll give the new show a try, although I suspect a lot of us will be busy on Sunday afternoons, particularly over the summer. I was also a bit taken aback by how similar the format is to Dueling Dealers. I was really hoping for something different, but ultimately what's important is what art are they selling and at what prices.

I'm looking forward to it, but I do think the weekly Dueling Dealers plus the amateur Dueling Dealers plus Neal Adams' claim sales plus Clan McDonald events, The Experience sales, etc. have diluted the market a bit for online events. There's just so much to keep up with given limited time and funds. I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but here are a few changes I'd love to see in the future: 1) Ability to list art with a starting price and allow people to place bids up to the end of the con. Prices are moving so rapidly these days that it's often really challenging to come up with fair pricing. That's probably the biggest reason why I decided to sit this one out as a seller. 2) More flexibility on Adding/Removing/Updating pieces during the con. At a physical convention you can decide to bring certain pieces on Day 2 based on Day 1 sales or add/remove items from your table depending on how things are going. I think a lot of people may have a target $ amount of sales in mind and would like to be able to remove other items once the target is met. (I haven't checked the current setup in detail, so apologies if you can now do some of this.) Regards, Ted

Giant-Size X-Men #1 cover color guide for 30K! That's got to be a record right?

I put in all my votes yesterday and it was really tough, particularly in the covers and pages categories! Maybe in the future we should think about splitting the most popular categories out further by era -- maybe Pre-Silver Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Copper Age, Modern Age. At this point, most of the top vote-getters in those categories will probably be $50K or more pieces, so it would be nice to try and figure out how to split that further to give more art a chance to get recognized. Agreed that the new voting process is much better -- kudos to Bill and Brian. I'm not posting my votes here as it was exhausting enough just to vote in every category. I guess I had a good year, because while I doubt my covers will get many (if any) votes, I personally love them and smiled when I saw them show up. I don't vote for my own pieces out of principle though. A few additional thoughts: What do people feel about art submitted that wasn't obtained in 2020, but just uploaded to CAF in 2020? I know some people did it, but I think it kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. (I could probably get some votes by uploading my Wrightson Frankenstein or Ditko Dr. Strange, but it doesn't seem right since I've had them for 15-20 years). It definitely feels like enthusiasm for strip art has diminished in recent years as there's less and less each time. Maybe more strip collectors are in Europe or older and don't post on CAF as much, but it's a shame. There were definitely some great strips posted, but considering that many more people have probably read newspaper comic strips than comic books, it seems a bit counter-intuitive. I can't believe there wasn't even one Krazy Kat strip posted this year (although kudos again to Bill for organizing that great panel discussion on the strip recently).

Just a reminder to everyone to please encase art in a plastic bag within the package. I recently received a package that was wet and the art boards suffered some water damage. The art was wrapped in tissue paper within the cardboard. Thankfully the ink didn't run, but the paper will never be the same again. It wasn't raining the day the art was sent or received, so this must have happened at some point in transit. This art isn't valuable enough to warrant professional restoration, so I'm flattening it as best I can, but it'll probably never fully recover.

PUBLISHED Immortal Hulk #34 pages 6-7 by Butch Guice and Tom Palmer

PUBLISHED War of the Go-Bots (1984 Golden Book) page 1 by Steve Ditko (https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1608195)

PUBLISHED Defenders #1 (2001) page 11 by Erik Larsen and Klaus Janson

I enjoyed the Con and picked up a piece from my want list -- while missing out on a few other things. It was also cool seeing some of the higher end art (such as that amazing Wrightson House of Mystery cover Albert was selling) even if most of it was out of my price range. I held off on selling anything (still reluctant to visit the Post Office), but would definitely participate in the future. A few thoughts for future cons: 1) It would be nice for dealers to be able to cycle artwork between days -- so that there would be a new supply of pieces on Sunday morning. 2) On a similar note, it might also be good for commission lists to start a few hours before or after the art for sale postings to give people time to focus on one or the other. 3) It might also be nice for people to see how many art requests are already pending for a piece (basically a counter that would increment when someone submitted the request form). This would help to avoid wasting time requesting pieces with multiple requests already pending. (Maybe there could be an option for a dealer to reset this counter on a piece if a deal doesn't go through.)

Amazing Adventures (Killraven) #32 page 10 by P. Craig Russell and Dan Green. This is undoubtedly the most psychedelic art in my collection!

That's great! FYI that I looked through both issues of the Fantagraphics Ditko Collection books and it's not included in there. Those books only go up to 1976, so it's possible this was done a bit later.

This is from an 80's era Dave Cockrum Nightcrawler sketch, which I've been fortunate enough to own since 1999. You can see the drawing and more details here: https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1450251

Sorry for the belated reply. This was used for a house ad for the Human Fly. Dave didn't remember exactly, but thought that someone in the bullpen might have added the stats as a joke before it was returned to him. I owned this for about 15 years before selling on Heritage in 2017.

1. John Byrne 2. Dave Cockrum 3. Jim Lee 4. Paul Smith 5. Mark Silvestri 6. John Romita Jr. Cockrum is my personal favorite, but I have to credit Byrne as he probably had more to do with the X-Men's success than any other artist. I'm not ranking the #1-93 artists, otherwise Jack Kirby and Neal Adams would have to be up there too. I've also omitted the last 15 or so years as I'm not overly familiar. Whoops - I forgot Paul Smith, who had a great run after Cockrum's second time around. I went back and added him above Silvestri.

I have a collection of Dave Cockrum prelims which you can see here: https://www.comicartfans.com/galleryroom.asp?gsub=188397 It's hard to choose favorites, but probably these two, due to the amount of detail. The Black Panther prelim was pretty much used as is for the published cover, while Gil Kane went in a slightly different direction for Captain Marvel #53.