• When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Interview with MIKE BURKEY--the art dealer's perspective on OCAL

Started by glenbru,

216 posts in this topic

Phill the Governor

Phill the Governor

Posted
Posted

Very informative thread.

 

What a sneaky thing to do. I actually laughed when Glen stated:

 

"Mike looked at this more as a betrayal of our friendship. I looked at this more as a business situation."

 

Really goes to show that deep, deep down, most people only care about those fresh clean cash money bills.

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Aman619

Aman619

Posted
Posted
Well, I did not intend to discuss this again since this event was many years ago but I feel I should add my POV at this point.

 

Mike and I are good friends again and I thought bringing this up again might bring up bad feelings which I do not want.

 

It is true that this began as a loan for a year for the sum of 9000. But Mike's attorney got involved and changed the terms of the contract to a sale for one year with an added penalty clause that if I failed to return the art to Mike in one year I would owe Mike a total of 18k.

 

At the time the story was considered to be worth 10k. I had offered Mike 12k to buy the story but he refused. I had never offered more than that.

 

Over the course of the year while I had the story in my posscession the Romita market heated up and the value of the story more than doubled. It was now a bargain at 18k. I decided to enact the penalty clause because I felt Mike had put that as a price on the art. If he had wanted to put a penalty to insure that I would return the art why not make it 100k or some number that would have been insane to pay. I felt that he had put this price of 18k into our contract and was now upset because the art was worth closer to 25k.

 

Mike's contention was it was more about the art and a loan. My contention was that we had a contract that I decided to exercise to its legal extent.

 

Mike looked at this more as a betrayal of our friendship. I looked at this more as a business situation.

 

Looking back on this years later I do have to commend Mike for his forgiving nature after feeling like I had betrayed him. Mike had some really bad advice from his attorney but I did think at the

time that Mike's intent was to set a price on the art in our contract which I felt justified in exercising.

 

I'm glad we've been able to get past the bad feelings and get to a place where both feel like friends again and that we've both done each other favors many times over in the hundreds of deals we've done since.

 

Glen

 

Three things strike me:

 

1) You have a very "interesting" way of interpreting thing.

 

2) If, at the time of the entire contract, you considered Mike your "friend" then you and I have very different definitions of the word.

 

3) To answer your question "why not make it $100k penalty?", penalties are not allowed or enforceable under contract law, regardless of who seeks to trigger them and to what end.

 

 

wow. Ive only read this far, but Glen, Im glad youre not my collecting buddy! You took advantage of your friend by using the contract as an out to pay less than what the art was worth. He added that clause to protect himself, but you must have been angry he didnt trust you. so a year later? you paid him back real good. But in using the contract to get a steal on the art, you just proved he was right not to trust you!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
thehumantorch

thehumantorch

Posted
Posted
Well, I did not intend to discuss this again since this event was many years ago but I feel I should add my POV at this point.

 

Mike and I are good friends again and I thought bringing this up again might bring up bad feelings which I do not want.

 

It is true that this began as a loan for a year for the sum of 9000. But Mike's attorney got involved and changed the terms of the contract to a sale for one year with an added penalty clause that if I failed to return the art to Mike in one year I would owe Mike a total of 18k.

 

At the time the story was considered to be worth 10k. I had offered Mike 12k to buy the story but he refused. I had never offered more than that.

 

Over the course of the year while I had the story in my posscession the Romita market heated up and the value of the story more than doubled. It was now a bargain at 18k. I decided to enact the penalty clause because I felt Mike had put that as a price on the art. If he had wanted to put a penalty to insure that I would return the art why not make it 100k or some number that would have been insane to pay. I felt that he had put this price of 18k into our contract and was now upset because the art was worth closer to 25k.

 

Mike's contention was it was more about the art and a loan. My contention was that we had a contract that I decided to exercise to its legal extent.

 

Mike looked at this more as a betrayal of our friendship. I looked at this more as a business situation.

 

Looking back on this years later I do have to commend Mike for his forgiving nature after feeling like I had betrayed him. Mike had some really bad advice from his attorney but I did think at the

time that Mike's intent was to set a price on the art in our contract which I felt justified in exercising.

 

I'm glad we've been able to get past the bad feelings and get to a place where both feel like friends again and that we've both done each other favors many times over in the hundreds of deals we've done since.

 

Glen

 

Three things strike me:

 

1) You have a very "interesting" way of interpreting thing.

 

2) If, at the time of the entire contract, you considered Mike your "friend" then you and I have very different definitions of the word.

 

3) To answer your question "why not make it $100k penalty?", penalties are not allowed or enforceable under contract law, regardless of who seeks to trigger them and to what end.

 

 

wow. Ive only read this far, but Glen, Im glad youre not my collecting buddy! You took advantage of your friend by using the contract as an out to pay less than what the art was worth. He added that clause to protect himself, but you must have been angry he didnt trust you. so a year later? you paid him back real good. But in using the contract to get a steal on the art, you just proved he was right not to trust you!

 

This. Especially after he had said he never wanted to sell the pages and was loaning them to you, at your request, to be nice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
glenbru

glenbru

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Excuse me, Stonecutter69, who are you really?

 

You sound an awful lot like Felix Lu in the few posts you've made against me since you joined days ago.

 

If you're not Felix, you should get to know him. You seem to share an agenda and could be close friends.

 

Glen

Link to comment
Share on other sites
malvin

malvin

Posted
Posted

I have no horse in this race (or however that expression is said)

 

but I do know for a fact that you can't have 2 ID's on this board. A friend was over and he logged into this board on my computer and we both got a message from Mods saying that both our ID's logged on from the same IP and 2 ID's aren't allowed.

 

Of course since we are actually 2 different people and it only happened that one time it was ok

 

Malvin

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nexus

Nexus

Posted
Posted
Excuse me, Stonecutter69, who are you really?

 

You sound an awful lot like Felix Lu in the few posts you've made against me since you joined days ago.

 

If you're not Felix, you should get to know him. You seem to share an agenda and could be close friends.

 

Glen

 

Heh...I PM'd Stonecutter when he joined. I was curious who he was as well. He hasn't replied.

 

But it's not me. I don't do anonymous posts. I've got "big brass balls", remember Glen? lol!

 

Felix

 

P.S. I believe the mods know where posts are coming from via IP addresses. Isn't that how they always find your mouthpiece's shill IDs? You know, PrechterFool/KK?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
bluechip

bluechip

Posted
Posted
Thank you Rob for waking me up. This thread had seemingly stalled a few days ago and I had planned on letting the sleeping dog lie. However you have convinced me otherwise. It is textbook behavior for people like Glen and Rob when they cannot rebut the content of a message to move right to assailing the messenger or his motives. This assumes that people are stupid and can be distracted by the next shiny bauble held in front of them. The original Comicart-l posts stand on their own and there has been no dispute from either side regarding their contents.

Whether or not the dispute has been settled between the parties is entirely irrelevant to the issue. This is not about re-hashing or asking Mike and Glen to re-visit their personal dispute. The 13-year old publicly told story is relevant because Glen has decided to put himself in the public eye with his latest venture, holding himself up as the voice of the hobby, and proclaiming that he's "trying to do good" for it by informing the masses. Well just because he says it, doesn't make it so. And frankly I don't remember anyone electing him to be the voice of the hobby. I certainly did not.

I'm now convinced that stories like this need to live on forever as cautionary tales to all comic art collectors both veteran and unseasoned. I will certainly do my best to spread the word to every pertinent online forum whenever the opportunity presents itself and urge other like-minded collectors to do the same. So unless Rob or one of his associates has prepared an assault on free speech(or more name-calling), I'm not sure what else needs to be said.

Again, thank you Rob for waking me up.

 

I wasn't talking about you Ferran... I am agains the trolls too, that's my point!

 

I didn't know about this either.

 

This controversy has all been settled between the parties...why the glee in bringing it up again (not by you)?

 

It's all bad intentioned.

 

Rob

 

If any civilians were to read this, they'd come away with something like this:

 

John Romita's art was put on the market somewhat under the radar and one collector managed to outmaneuver others so that he acquired an overwhelming percentage of the work, and then another collector managed to outmaneuver him out of one of the stories, but only for a while, and the original collector got that story back and boost his percentage of the total back up again. Years later, collector 1 and 2 have patched up their dispute over the story and people unassociated with the deal are fighting about it, for reasons that are not entirely clear but seem to be connected to bitterness about other deals not currently part of the discussion

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Bronty

Bronty

Posted
Posted

Did Homer Simpson's "I can't believe its a Law Firm!" lawyer write that contract? :insane: The first half reads as if its a loan, the second half reads as if its a sale with options.

 

Oy vey. What a mess, and what a mess of a "clarifying" document. :tonofbricks:

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
comix4fun

comix4fun

Posted
Posted

 

John Romita's art was put on the market somewhat under the radar and one collector managed to outmaneuver others so that he acquired an overwhelming percentage of the work,

 

 

 

If this is translated to "Burkey was buying Romita artwork when no one else gave a about it and the majority of collectors didn't give it a second look and thought it was junk compared to Ditko, and pages could be had for $50 or less a pop and covers for $350 a piece and Mike was the only one who liked the stuff enough to actually pay for it" then I agree. lol

 

 

It wasn't really under the radar. Mike was buying a lot of his stash in the days when you could grab a foot high stack of that artwork for less than the cost of one panel page today. People still talk about the pile hat Esposito had at his convention appearances back then.

 

MIke just bought the artwork. He certainly didn't turn a loan into ownership. So I don't think we can equate Mike's purchase of his Romita collection to him being "outmaneuvered" later on. That's too convenient an out and falls too short of actuality.

 

 

 

people unassociated with the deal are fighting about it, for reasons that are not entirely clear but seem to be connected to bitterness about other deals not currently part of the discussion an aversion to revisionism .

 

In my opinion this is closer to the reason. lol

 

 

 

Much like running for office, when someone puts thensleves out there as the solution to a problem, as a representative of an endeavor, as a standard-bearer of a movement, they have to expect their past, warts and all, to become part of the discussion. Those that forget (or never hear of) the past are doomed to repeat it or have it repeated UPON them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Scott Dunbier

Scott Dunbier

Posted
Posted

If this is translated to "Burkey was buying Romita artwork when no one else gave a about it and the majority of collectors didn't give it a second look and thought it was junk compared to Ditko, and pages could be had for $50 or less a pop and covers for $350 a piece and Mike was the only one who liked the stuff enough to actually pay for it" then I agree. lol

 

The above is 100% true. I actually sold Mike his first Spider-Man pages. I think it was in 1988 or 1989 (Mike could most likely tell you). I had an ad in CBG with three twice up Romita Spidey pages from issues 45 and 46. These were four panel action pages with great shots of Spider-Man. Because they were so damn good I priced them very high—$110 a page. Nice pages went for about $75 bucks at the time but I felt these were exceptional. After one week not even a nibble on them, no interest. At some point Mike called. The really funny part is, Mike was going back and forth on getting the Romita pages or buying a big pile of Dan DeCarlo Archie art I had. Eventually Mike went with Romita (at the full price), and the course of history was set. Can you imagine if it had gone the other way? DeCarloMan?

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
bluechip

bluechip

Posted
Posted

If this is translated to "Burkey was buying Romita artwork when no one else gave a about it and the majority of collectors didn't give it a second look and thought it was junk compared to Ditko, and pages could be had for $50 or less a pop and covers for $350 a piece and Mike was the only one who liked the stuff enough to actually pay for it" then I agree. lol

 

The above is 100% true. I actually sold Mike his first Spider-Man pages. I think it was in 1988 or 1989 (Mike could most likely tell you). I had an ad in CBG with three twice up Romita Spidey pages from issues 45 and 46. These were four panel action pages with great shots of Spider-Man. Because they were so damn good I priced them very high—$110 a page. Nice pages went for about $75 bucks at the time but I felt these were exceptional. After one week not even a nibble on them, no interest. At some point Mike called. The really funny part is, Mike was going back and forth on getting the Romita pages or buying a big pile of Dan DeCarlo Archie art I had. Eventually Mike went with Romita (at the full price), and the course of history was set. Can you imagine if it had gone the other way? DeCarloMan?

 

 

 

 

The term outmaneuvered does not necessarily mean either party did anything bad. And the use of it should not be considered an attack on either party.

 

Too often, here, people assume that you must attack one person or another in one of these flame wars, and if you're not attacking the person they want you to attack, then you're attacking the person they are supporting.

 

The way I described it is simply the way the average person, who reads the bare facts without any preconception, would interpret the situation. It is up to the individual to decide whether that reaction is good or bad for the hobby or for the continued valuation of the pieces being discussed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
PrechterFool-migration

PrechterFool-migration

Posted
Posted
Excuse me, Stonecutter69, who are you really?

 

You sound an awful lot like Felix Lu in the few posts you've made against me since you joined days ago.

 

If you're not Felix, you should get to know him. You seem to share an agenda and could be close friends.

 

Glen

 

Heh...I PM'd Stonecutter when he joined. I was curious who he was as well. He hasn't replied.

 

But it's not me. I don't do anonymous posts. I've got "big brass balls", remember Glen? lol!

 

Felix

 

P.S. I believe the mods know where posts are coming from via IP addresses. Isn't that how they always find your mouthpiece's shill IDs? You know, PrechterFool/KK?

 

Why drag me into this? I don't have a dog in this fight.

 

I am just calling "balls" and "strikes" as I see it.

 

Your a real person_who_is_obnoxiously_self-impressed & curmudgeon Felix. A real keyboard warrior.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nexus

Nexus

Posted
Posted
Why drag me into this?

 

You've got 11 posts in this thread before this one. You want to rethink that question?

 

I don't have a dog in this fight.

 

Yeah, you do.

 

I am just calling "balls" and "strikes" as I see it.

 

Thanks for that. Revealing.

 

Your a real person_who_is_obnoxiously_self-impressed & curmudgeon Felix. A real keyboard warrior.

 

KK called me a "keyboard warrior". This from the guy whose entire history here consists of having multiple shill IDs. That's great! :applause::roflmao:

 

Oh yeah...who are you again?

 

lol

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Go to topic listing