MyNameIsLegion

you were saying?

that of course is not true- this issue has depictions of African American human villagers, witch doctors, and the aforementioned zombie. there's also a flashback of Scrooge leading villagers to smash up a village of "savages" There's also "black ducks, and I don't mean Daffy Duck, where they are depicted to be caricatures of black features. I found the issue in a run of Uncle Scrooge we had in a 100K collection, and it's worse than I thought. There's a reason Disney banned this issue forever. You'd think this was something out of the 1950's.

it instantly reminds me of the Wood Beast scene in the Flash Gordon movie.

RWD I think worked for Lewis Wayne Galleries, which I think was a side thing of Halperin's slough off dreck he won at HA? (when the house bets with house money, win or lose, you win) His proximity to DFW made him the logical conservator for HA or Halperin. I know he was FB friends with other HA reps, because sometimes they'd even suggest he tone down some of his online screeds. Their affiliation with RWD may have been completely professional and had no bearing on their willingness to accept the racist Scrooge art for consignment, but someone apparently thought it was ok. I don't know if the fact that this is the European auction has anything to do with it. I don't see how really. Lot's of adult themed things are more likely to be in the Euro auction, and that's fine, just as it's fine to show all sort of underground art. But it usually comes with a little more consideration of not making the images quite so readily visible. Whatever, it's just my opinion, but my opinion is what dictates where and with whom I do business. I am curious how Disney lawyers might look at it. HA may be the big dawg of their niche auction world, but if Disney wanted that stuff gone. It would be gone. Even if it meant pulling the auction and they paid them for it. They may not be aware of it yet.

is this the HA auction where they are selling the interiors to possibly the most racist Don Rosa Uncle Scrooge art produced by Disney in the modern era? (mid-90's) Disney has banned the comic from ever being reprinted, and HA has this almost passive-aggressive tone in their description of the pages chiding this decision because it's in the middle of a story arc. This, coupled with their association with Robert Wayne Dennis who was sentenced for 3 years for assaulting an officer on Jan. 6th has made me reluctant to ever consign with them. You know, at least make a half-assed effort to warn viewers. If it had a nipple on it you'd have to have an account, and present yourself as an adult to view the image, but you can show egregiously offensive cartoon depictions of African-American's and that's perfectly alright? I guess they will print a catalog of them too. So in a way, the story has gotten reprinted. (minus word balloons)

This seems like as as good a time as any to share this little gem:

I think there is a distinction to be made of scarcity versus demand here, expanding on my earlier post about a flood of comics coming onto market as boomers age out. Iron Man #1 is common as dirt, as all late 60s and on books are. The number of Centaurs are genuinely rare, but the current owners of all known and unknown copies are also going to be part of the great flood. There may be some books that exit in the low double digits, but so too are the number of parties interested in them in 10-15 years. Millennial's do not care about Centaurs, Fox, Ace, MLJ or Cheslers, hell as a Gen-Xer I don't really care either, and I would not sink money in them in ten years because I'd never break even on them. You can impart and influence a level of interest in the generation behind you, but not nostalgia, and that influence drops like a rock to the grandkids. They will like Centaurs, Fox, Ace, MLJ or Cheslers even less than you like Pokemon, Dragonball-Z, or Minecraft.

Exhibit A:

OA is a different story. It's the ultimate one of a kind, truly unique collectible. Every page of comic art, from Action 1 to the books that came out last week (assuming they're not digitally penciled and/or inked) are equal in that regard. Granted, one may be harder to find relative to another, one may be more desirable than another and fetch a premium. last week a Nick Cardy B&B page went for over 20K, that probably the FMV was $1500 tops. But 2 guys felt otherwise for some esoteric reason that probably has to do with the current OA market manipulation of hyping birth pages and first appearances. Seasoned OA collectors scoff at this- but it's a direct result of the bleed-over of comic collector/speculators that have run out of ways to manufacture rarity and scarcity in the slabbing racket. Pedigree labels, registry sets, SS, old labels, new labels, event labels. You know what the difference is between a 9.8 Iron Man #1 Pedigree and a some other label contrivance? Not a thing. Nada. Zilch. Well that's not true, the difference is the price premium some sucker paid for it purely for that label, CGC started as a 3rd party grading service and morphed into selling labels with different colors and serial numbers and words to create the illusion of uniqueness for items printed in the hundreds of thousands, millions even. Those intending to make money off that will argue this. Those that have spent money on it, they will argue this even more vociferously. Such is the nature of cognitive dissonance. A this stage in my collecting/buying/selling journey, I've come to admire the market efficiency of the MCS system, and I'm content to send it all there, RAW and let the chips fall where they may.

The market dipped a bit due to the Great Recession, which had a tremendous macro-economic impact on collecting, but pandemic buying and easy money fueled a whole other level of tulip-mania. These things never end well, and when they end, they end with greater finality than just a cyclical turn. this may not be 1982 stamp collecting level Armageddon, in part because the comics are the pop-culture engine. However, what CGC has done to the hobby has it parallels. The manufactured collectibility of a plastic case sporting a label and a number is backed only by the faith and interest of those willing to buy it. Little, if anything printed in the last 50 years is genuinely rare, including the subset that has been slabbed which only goes up, and suddenly your high census copy is average, and priced accordingly. We are also entering the twilight of the boomer impact on pop-culture, the WW2 generation has largely passed. Comics are an artifact of their era. They created it all. Gen-X is the last generation to remember spinner racks, and cheap plastic super-hero Halloween masks at the grocery store. Just as Radio shows, comic strips, train-sets, pulps, westerns, have faded out, comics too have a finite lifespan. The MCU was the pinnacle of all our boyhood fantasies, to see what we could only dream of leap off the page of newsprint and onto a 4K high def screen. And then, like with most things, it became routine, repetitive, commonplace, and the last several years of movies, despite being cooped up during the pandemic, audience are largely...bored. The bulk of the population under 45 doesn't especially care about comics. They don't buy, read,slab and store them with the same fervor older generations would be inclined to. Sure, some here defy the odds, but you don't change the odds. They will never, ever match what previous generations felt, because their experience was very different growing up. They will gravitate towards those Pokemon cards, or some game system. The majority of boomers are in their 70's, their stuff is going to flood all levels of resale and collecting. Much of it, stored away in their McMansions, garages, and storage units will not be absorbed by their children and grandchildren. They don't want it, can't store it, won't use it. I know this from experience, having spent the last few years winding down my parents, grandparents, and now in-laws houses and estates. Most of it went in the trash or was donated or given away. You need a set of wedding china? How about 4? The market will ultimately be awash in comics. Supply will exceed demand. that's just the way it is. It's just math, and math don't care about anyone's feelings or opinions or anecdotal experience.

I found my grandmother stamp collection in the late 70's and was really into that for a few years- pre-dating comics really and there was even a stamp club in elementary run by a teacher who was not much younger than my grandmother. Stamps crashed hard and forever in the early 80's. Now I have all that stamp stuff, have since picked up ridiculously cheap stamp albums here and there, and honestly, most of that I could just dump in the recycling bin now. I just gave away a rusty train set from my grandparents house to the neighbor who is 13 years older than me- he seemed excited by it- great, he's a later boomer. this thread is really about (mostly) Gen-X (sorry boomers, you guys are busy destroying social security and medicare on your way out ) hitting the introspective wall of the dawn of getting "old" Gen -X is unique in that we were the last generation that grew up without the internet, remembers before cable/streaming/cell phones/game consoles/Spotify/bluetooth/wifi/etc. Honestly, if I could just have everything digitized that I own (that's not already digitized) in a format that I own (not subscribed, they can always take it away) that's has triple redundant back-up and is backwards compatible with everything going forward- I could get rid of 50% of the stuff in this house. Paper, Photos, Books, Comics, CD, LP, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. Even random objects that hold memories and nostalgia. If I could have a 360 degree scan of them, like you can get with some shopping sites for things, I could preserve the memory of that toy, or grandpa's pipe, mom's favorite cookie jar, whatever- and not have to store the physical object somewhere. When we cleared out my parents house, due to my dad's 50 years or smoking and living in a house without AC, a great many things were not salvageable whatsoever. As I was throwing them in the rented dumpster, I just took a quick photo of it with my iphone, to remember things that I had forgotten/had not seen in 40 years.

this is a great post! Very poignant, and extendable to outside of just collecting. I've spent the last several years as parents, in-laws and grandparents have entered nursing homes or died tasked with winding down their affairs and clearing out their houses stuffed with things they could not let go of, or didn't have the strength or will to deal with. I've been faced with the same quandary of letting their things go, things that were familiar to me my entire life. Pieces of furniture like the china cabinet that occupied a corner of my grandmothers dining room and a corner of my mind since what seems like the beginning of time. I've spent waaaaay too much time needlessly, carefully, thoughtfully editing it down, looking at it, thinking about it, sorting it (what to keep, who tho give it to, what to sell, what to donate, what to trash- I shoulda donated or trashed a far greater % with much less thought) I've reduced the life of a 97 year old woman in what could fit in a 10 foot u-haul. She kept all her mother stuff, who kept a lot of her mother's stuff, and so on. 150 years of....stuff. I'm carrying, needlessly, the emotional burden of some of this stuff solely out of a sense of duty. Meanwhile, life goes on, or it should, but here I am looking backwards. It's made me acutely aware of all the stuff I've accumulated, deliberately, in my collecting. That stuff takes up a huge amount of space and time and sometimes money (much less so now than before).

hmm... https://www.paulmartinsmith.com/content/inking-gil-kane-2-johnny-thunder Paul Smith seems to suggest that Toth inked Kane for the #122 cover. heres' another thing to consider: I read somewhere that Kane was apt to do drawing demonstrations for some type of audience or class, and often would recreate works of his that he previously penciled on other types of paper other than standard comic paper. The implication thus being that many of the "prelims" that have been sold of Kane may not have been prelims that preceded the final pencils, but studies done for education purposes years or decades later. this has always made me leery of any Kane prelims for that reason. I also found this interesting quote- specifically about Kane and Toth: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/aberrant-behavior-on-alex-toth/ "Gil Kane, a cartoonist and contemporary of Toth’s, was one of those aforementioned admirers, who was able, to his credit, to separate his personal feelings about the man — Toth and Kane hated each other’s guts, apparently from the day they met — and continue to worship the work despite that lifelong animus. He said, and I quote, “Toth has never had the popular regard of [Jack] Kirby, [Frank] Frazetta, of [Wallace] Wood, because the bravura styles of these men are infinitely more appealing to comic book readers than the complex subtleties and abstractions of Toth’s style.” Oh, and this is on Pinterest:

Well, when this comic came out- Kane was working almost exclusively at Marvel. He had pencil credits in Johnny Thunder #2 &#3. But Toth did all 3 covers. The other Kane work for DC was sporadic, mostly genre related. Given that Marvel and DC were not keen on artists freelancing at the competition it may be these stories were in the can at DC already, and maybe Kane had done a prelim cover for #3. Probably not even specifically for #3, just a a cover. Because the stories are just one-shots, no real continuity, it may be that they hired Toth to do all 3 when they needed 3 covers with only one from Kane in the tank, so Toth just redrew it.

I’m pretty sure that Larry’s transgressions go back a whopping 20 years on the comicart-l mailing list. I feel bad for Mike A, I think he means well but the minute I saw him announce he was his new rep a few weeks ago and what a great guy Larry was I knew he was hopelessly misinformed and way out of his depth and would do material damage to his own reputation in the process. I considered dropping the FB group he runs just for that.

Quite true - there was a prominent forger in the last couple of years that painted hundreds of fakes that were sold by the big auction houses to museums and private collectors. The extent of his crimes are so massive that they will never fully ferret out all his forgeries. In fact, too many probably prefer NOT to know, as their leveraged net worth and reputations and insurance premiums would suffer mightily. Everyone is in on it that isn’t a documented victim. People suck.

Thank you, that is precisely my point- HA provides safe harbor for the Donnelly’s to peddle these fakes. They’re not stupid, Jim knows who they are, so does Joe. They just don’t care enough to ask too many questions or be more precise in their listings. If it was a Monet, don’t think Sotheby’s or Christie’s wouldn’t authenticate it 6 ways to Sunday first and still have insurance in case things go sideways after the fact.

Ah ok @Rick2you2 then I think we are more on the same page then. It is precisely because the Donnelly’s price things implying “strikes” of some variety merit partial credit in the form of a rejected or prelim cover price bump versus an unpublished commission. What’s so egregious is they are hitting a T-ball 5-10 years after the game and claiming it’s a game winning home run. Just in the last day of discussing this subject offline, multiple seasoned collectors have related anecdotes of Steve D’s borderline pathological efforts to defraud potential buyers with fake covers and vehemently defend their justification in attributing as such and their price bump.

Umm, have you been collecting OA for the last 20 years? The number of prototype covers, prelims, alternate covers, cover layouts, cover proposals, and every possible way of suggesting the item being offered in someway was involved in the production of the actual published cover at the time it was originally produced. Never is it simply described as a cover recreation. Why do you think that is? Because “recreation” is a second rate collectible, and doesn’t get a fraction of the price of the published comic art. The Donnelly’s have been fraudulently presenting for sale art that has zero connection with the creation, production, or printing of the original cover. These are pinups or commissions created years or decades later that they are doctoring with fake trade dress. They price it as if it were a true alternative cover rejected by Stan or Carmine or the like, as if it had some legitimate provenance ( from the Marvel or DC archives, or the artists portfolio. It’s textbook fraud. HA becomes an unwitting accessory by obscuring who is the consignor. A seasoned OA collector won’t touch any of this nonsense on CAF, but consigning it anonymizes the piece, such that someone less experienced could be duped to pay a premium for something that’s junk.

what was I just saying about eh Donnely's manufacturing fake cover art to sell?

100% this. I'm very sorry Mike. having been through this all I can offer is to give yourself space- don't assume what you feel or don't feel today about some aspect of your mother's passing won't change with time and don't feel pressured to do or say or make decisions about anything that doesn't suite you, your family, her memory and it's perfectly normal to change your mind later.

“Two Booths for Mr. Bedrock” if we get Tom Coker in a nun outfit we got ourselves a bonafide western

and this is precisely my point- once it's been washed and rinsed through HA, and oh so vaguely detailed (we don't know who, what, or MOST IMPORTANTLY WHEN) the art was restored, if in fact it was a prelim, alternate cover, or just a random pin-up or commission marketed as having something to do with a PUBLISHED piece which is the defining attribute of OA that gets a $$$ premium. There's nothing to corroborate any of it, no COA, just that it was in a HA auction once. Maybe a better sleuth could find some digital trail of it being listed by the Donnely's at some point, but they might have actually gotten smarter and never posted it FS online for that very reason. Just how much responsibility does the auction house have as to the authenticity of the consigned object? Sotheby's and Christie's seem to assume more when questions have come up with fakes or things that had questionable ownership title, and cooperate with investigations by Interpol and other law enforcement (think WW2 Nazi art theft and antiquities that were stolen from Irag or elsewhere) but HA is probably NOT asking too many questions on purpose for the nascent comic book art market.