NYTimes: 50 Years of Comic Book Art by Joe Kubert Going to Auction

[kahml]

Not sure (even after a search) if this appeared any where in the forums:

November 17, 2009

A Gallery of Heroes, Up for Sale

By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES

 

Joe Kubert, a comic book artist since 1938, has little interest in the accumulated work of his last seven decades; his focus is on new projects, he said recently. But comic book fans who feel differently about this celebrated illustrator will have a chance to peruse and even own some of that older work this week, when 18 covers and interior pages, published from the 1940s to 1990, are put up for sale.

 

Mr. Kubert, 83, has turned over a large trove of his original work to Heritage Auctions in Dallas, which will hold the first of several auctions, live and online, on Friday.

 

“Joe’s obviously one of the very small handful of great artists that has worked in comics over the last 50-plus years,” said Todd Hignite, a consignment director for Heritage who specializes in original comic art. Mr. Hignite searched through Mr. Kubert’s home, business office and storage space in northern New Jersey to amass the selection.

 

For serious fans of the medium it’s a tantalizing collection, though Mr. Kubert himself seems more amused than anything.

 

“I have no undying love for any of the stuff,” he said during a recent interview at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, N.J., which he founded in 1976 and where he still teaches. “I’m constantly looking toward the next job.”

 

Mr. Kubert sat near a drawing board bearing pages from a superhero story for DC Comics that he is illustrating with his son Andy. On a conference table sat a galley of a graphic novel, “Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965.” The book, based on a true story of an American Special Forces team and written and illustrated by Mr. Kubert, will be released by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics, in May.

 

Mr. Kubert was particularly critical of his earliest work, like a portfolio illustration from around 1944 of the team of superheroes known as the Seven Soldiers of Victory, which will be part of Friday’s auction. By then Mr. Kubert had been working in comics for six years, and at $5 a page, he said, he was earning more than his father, a butcher.

 

But “the work was horrible,” he added. “They shouldn’t have paid me.”

 

He is humble too about his early history, which is filled with encounters with historic figures of the comic book industry. Near the start of his career, for example, he worked for MLJ Comics, the forerunner of Archie Comics, where he inked over the pencil lines of Bob Montana, the original illustrator of Archie and his friends.

 

Being utterly ignorant of the tools and techniques of comic artistry when he began working at it as an after-school job at the age of 11, Mr. Kubert said, he relied on such luminaries not just for high-flown inspiration but for basic lessons, like what pencils, inks, erasers and even paper to use. “I didn’t know original art was larger than the printed page,” he said.

 

Although the trade was not an obvious route to financial security, Mr. Kubert’s parents were supportive.

 

“They saw how much I loved doing what I was doing,” he said. “It also kept me out of trouble,” which, in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where he grew up, was “easy to get into.”

 

By the 1950s Mr. Kubert was producing some of the work that he would become best known for: the adventures of Tor, a caveman-type character who first appeared in 1953; covers and interior pages for DC’s war comics; and renderings of the medieval Viking Prince and the high-flying Hawkman.

 

Much of his earliest work, like much other comic art from that period, is lost. In the early days of the industry, original art was considered so unimportant that it was given away, used to sop up spills or simply discarded. Saving it was rarely considered, especially since “a lot of us were of the mind-set that the publisher owned the work,” Mr. Kubert said.

 

It was only later, when companies began automatically returning the originals, that he started saving them.

 

The 18 pieces in Friday’s auction have reserve prices ranging from $300 to $3,250. Mr. Hignite said he believed that Mr. Kubert’s cover illustrations will get between $2,500 and $5,000, though “we fully expect a percentage are going to go for significantly higher prices than that.”

 

“The beauty of original comic art is that it’s not seen as this pure investment,” Mr. Hignite said. “There’s not really a way to stand back and objectively look at the market. The people who collect the stuff are so emotionally attached it.”

 

Last year an interior page from the 1963 X-Men No. 1, by Jack Kirby, went for $33,460 (more then double its reserve price), and the 1952 cover of Weird Science No. 16, drawn by Wally Wood, sold privately for $200,000.

 

Jerry Weist, the author of “The Comic Art Price Guide,” recalled a work by Mr. Kubert — a 1962 cover of The Brave and the Bold — whose sale he oversaw on eBay. It sold for over $40,000 to Albert Moy, a comic-book-art dealer in Bayside, Queens.

 

“There’s pretty heavy demand for his work,” Mr. Weist said.

 

Mr. Kubert, who joined the industry when some people were embarrassed to admit they were comic book artists, seems to take the new interest in stride. “It’s come quite a ways,” he said of the comic book world and its offshoots like graphic novels and blockbuster films.

 

Despite his accomplishments, including 1997 Eisner and Harvey awards for his first graphic novel, “Fax From Sarajevo,” Mr. Kubert’s pride is more apparent when he is discussing his five children, for whose benefit, he said, he’s selling his art, and the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, a highly regarded institution with 110 students that he and his family have run since its founding. He credits his wife, Muriel, who died of breast cancer last year, for making the school a reality; he committed to being an instructor only because she agreed to handle the business side.

 

Mr. Kubert’s two youngest sons, Adam and Andy, also work at the school, teaching first- and second-year students, while their father instructs the third-year senior class. His daughter, Lisa, does administrative work for the school from West Virginia, and one of her sons — one of Mr. Kubert’s 12 grandchildren — is a second-year student at the school. (His other sons are David, a cable television lineman, and Danny, who deals in vintage toys.)

 

Adam, 50, and Andy, 47 are accomplished artists who have worked for DC and Marvel, but they too started out as Kubert students. Both received a stern warning from their father-headmaster.

 

“The moment you’re not doing your assignments, you’re out,” he recalled warning them. In the next breath, however, the pride was back: “They worked harder than anybody.”

 

Slideshow

 

Larry

 

[Varfleet]

Joe Kubert has and will always be one of my favorite artists. That slideshow has a Sgt. Rock piece I would love to have.

[MR.COMICBOOK]

great info, I will check it out,I always liked his Tarzan/Sgt.Rock artwork.