MyNameIsLegion

On 5/16/2024 at 5:01 AM, Rick2you2 said:

It’s not always so “black and white”. While most antiques with the look of age on them are considered better than if scrubbed, Art Deco and Mid-Century Modern furniture can be made more valuable with cleaning. Both styles look best when their clean, simple lines stand out, and the grime of age reduces it. If a piece had a bad bulky signature on it, or something else affecting its artistic integrity, I would get rid of it, too.

if people would just laminate their art when they buy it. All these things could be avoided! 

On 5/15/2024 at 8:02 PM, Michael Browning said:

I'll be honest: If I kept losing money, I'd stop selling until the pieces were worth what I had in them. Or, I wouldn't pay so much. Why overpay for pieces?

On 5/15/2024 at 4:36 PM, Michael Browning said:

Fifteen years ago, I dropped a quarter in a Books-A-Million and looked down with the intentions of picking it back up and putting it into my pocket. I got busy talking to the cashier and forgot to pick it up and left it there and it eats at me to this very day. I cannot imagine selling a piece of art and losing even a single penny on it and being okay with that. Nothing ever offsets a loss for me.

ah, the sunk cost fallacy.  That's not rational you know?  If your collection of Team America's pages peaked in 2020 due to a variety of external factors over which you have no control and will have no control in the future but it is clear that the longer you hold them, the more of your original investment you stand to lose then all things being equal- if you need to pair down your collection to pay for something else, or just cash out- the logical choice is to sell the pieces that stand a greater change of losing more money FIRST. 

unfortunately, humans are not rational. But in a scenario where: You need $400:  Option A is to sell a page where you have $500 cost basis and a 50% chance it will drop to $0 over time, but you can sell it right now for $400. Option B is to sell a page with a $250 cost basis, a 50% chance it will go up value over time, and you can sell it right now for $400. which do you sell? The logical choice is A.  If that feels wrong, and to many it does, that is the basis of the disposition effect

I watched most of Bill's CAL recap:  He admitted that Mother's Day weekend was not ideal, and was moved to that weekend to not conflict with another art show, but he won't do that again. I would also say he was competing with College Graduations on Saturday, and for the comic nerds that beat the odds and pro-created that was also a scheduling conflict. I know of at least one dealer that was juggling that. So Bill should stick to the next weekend, and if anyone else schedules a conflict, well too damn bad. 

• Some grumble that the site does not allow converting CAF classifieds into CAL listings. Well, that was by design, to keep it fresh, and I'm glad Bill pushed back on that. 
• He mentioned there is some way to go the other direction and convert the CAL listing to a classified. That might need a little FAQ, I know some aren't sure how. 
• Booths for sellers will stay up for 60 days before they are wiped.
• some of the improvements to the email notifications were in anticipation of the CAF Mobile app, with the intent  of that being live by the time CAL #10 roles around in November! That's huge.
• Saved sellers: It came up in the recap, but I think the site already saved sellers, and since the seller ID"s don't change, I had them marked as saved from previous CAL events. That was good for some, but annoying for others if they didn't participate (I had some saved with zero pieces in their booth) Maybe there needs to be an option to view previous saved sellers or not)

Some suggestions:

• Post con- or maybe End of Day 1 or Day 2- post an award for the Booths : Collectors and Dealers that sold the most art, to encourage them to actually sell stuff and close a deal. That then highlights they are a good seller worth watching.  You can have multiple categories: Most sales, highest sales, etc. this in turn encourages the sellers to not put Zero on the sold pieces (though that has gotten better, maybe 10 did that) 
• I think more could be done with the stats in general to highlight the most popular items in booths, most visiting booths, most popular searches etc. Make those real-time like they do in the main site. That builds a sense of urgency and excitement.
• Sunday Art Drop: Premium should have an hour early access like Saturday. It's not that hard to code.
• CAL sales should be part of CAF sales history feature.

I bought one piece from a long time Premium CAF member. We hadn't done a transaction in a dozen years although I always watch his gallery and he watches mine. I was pleased to make that one buy for that reason and pick up a cool SA page for a decent price for a character I've never had before that I had been coveting a representative piece. 

Classic Donnelly:

I know it must be very upsetting to have to post art with prices, but then they post the same Rom page twice, at 2 different prices, just like the way they like to quote it to you every time you ask and the price changes. 

On 5/12/2024 at 5:15 AM, Dr. Balls said:

It’s good to hear more people thinking like this.

 who cares?

we are dangerously close to:

"1st appearance of Deadpool holding a chimichanga in his left hand!"

"True first appearance of Etrigan the Demon ending a sentence in a preposition just to make it rhyme!"

"First appearance "Story continued after next page" paste-up in a Marvel New Universe book!"

First time an X-men character written by Claremont says "body and soul" dialog (ok that might be slightly interesting)

Zabu's first hariball!

If you still deal in comics, especially slabs of SA, BA, CA- you know the market has tanked on all keys by 50-75% off their Covid Highs, returning to 2019 levels.  Marvel movie hype is DEAD. But adjustments in pricing on OA relative to the commodities market of CGC books is much more resistant. The birth page nonsense hyped in the OA market the last couple of years was an extension of all that, and is going to end badly for the last guy that holds, but no one wants to take the loss. But everything else besides, those 4-5K BA pages that shot up during Covid were $1500 in 2018-2019 and not moving too fast. Now dealers have a new problem: They have to continue to prop up the market, but they also can't get material as readily because no one that bought in the last 5 years is will to take the loss or risk of a loss on a flip or trade. HA inventory is highly dependent on estate auctions.  Boomers dying is forcing material to come to market and dealers have to bid it all up to maintain price perception, and win enough to show fresh inventory. Their natural advantage of not paying tax and paying with consignments keeps it all moving, but the velocity of those dollars has to have slowed down. 

Go back and look at Dave McKean's original 75 issue run of The Sandman covers.  Around 1991 you start to see more obvious evidence that Dave was using photoshop to produce the covers. In hindsight, as someone who knew how to use Photoshop since 1992 in commercial printing his concepts are great, but his execution is fair to be kind. In 1994, Photoshop 3.0 was released, and that introduced layers. This was transformational for photo manipulation as previously it required using alpha channels in crude ways that "looked" unrealistic without a helluva lot of work. Lo and behold, the last third of the Sandman run Dave got better at it, but he also got lazy. What started in 1989 as shadow box assemblages with actual painted components drifted to layered textures of paint overlaid digitally,  He was starting to phone it in, or "photoshop it in" to be more precise.  Distress some type using funky fonts converted to bitmap in Photoshop,  reuse some paint layers, jack with the layer effects and opacity, and a few random B&W blurring images and you have a Sandman cover.  Dave's a great painter when he wants to be, but that probably wasn't commercially viable for him, or it simply took too much time. Technology allowed him to make a cover of an Eisner award winning comics for 75 issues, and by the end, he could probably crank one out in a single afternoon. He took full advantage of technology as it became available.  

These digital tools for the artist made it cheaper, easier and faster while he probably got paid the same or more. Lots of other "artists" followed in Dave's wake and starting producing book and comic covers. You see them in SPECTRUM's annual every year. It got pretty bad in the last 15 years.  Many are barely more than an enhanced digital photo. I started to suspect John Bolton was employing some digital slight of hand for the last decade.  His finished paintings looked like a digital photo reference.  We've employed digital artists to produce illustrations for packaging for years that used to be painted or drawn, but now are do in Photoshop or similar. They are absolutely taking an image and creating the effect of paint and then using paint effects with a WACOM pen to make it look less like the stock image.  There are plug-ins that do it for you so you don't need the artist to do it. We are probably to a point that Alex Ross could feed AI samples of his art, and photo references of his models and produce a pretty passable digital painting, maybe a comic layout in a fraction of the time it would take to paint traditionally.  If Alex does it, is that "cheating?" as long as we don't know, and get some cool new book from Ross no one will complain.  But if someone else does it in the style of  Alex Ross, they are ready to scream bloody murder. Other artists can ape Ross's style, (and then have) to produce work, but they still require the skill and training to do it.  AI let's everyone skip a lot of the steps in "earning" the rights and privilege of calling themselves an artist and the results are mixed, but it's amazing how forgiving we are when it's our own clumsy effort, or we just saved hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's good enough. That's one argument against AI. It's a rush to mediocrity not just theft of intellectual property. I think the former is the greater concern than the later TBH.  Eventually someone will be more than willing to provide the IP to plug into AI in the form of a styleguide or look. That's what they will be paid for, not the execution of the art itself, that's pure time and labor, no one wants to pay for it, and a great many artists don't really want to do it anyway.  Where we all bristle, is the encroaching uncanny valley of the resultant AI output.  It's not quite right, but it's good enough.  Mediocrity.  

Mediocrity has been the real enemy since the industrial revolution. It's all around you, You, me, all of us have largely become inured to it.  We will come to accept AI for art just as we have accepted autotune for music. 

Just posted what is for me, a longstanding comic art goal. A classic Colan/Palmer Dr. Strange page, and a splash to boot.

Dr. Strange splash by the mighty, magical, mystical art team of Gene Colan & Tom Palmer