furthur

I was fortunate when a friend visiting the UK met Boo Cook and told him she had a friend who loved comic art. Boo gifted her a couple of cover preliminary drawings and she then gave them to me when she got home.

Just met and got my first piece from Wayshak at OAX. Talented guy with a great imagination!

here is another prelim that is rarely seen (plenty of Frazetta prelims out there, but ever seen one for Johnny Comet? This one is actually on the back of a Johnny Comet and only after owning it for several years did someone point out to me that it was a preliminary drawing of a figure that appears about two weeks later in the continuity. Hell, I was just happy to get such a fine example of Frazetta's famous signature-art all by itself

Here is a prelim from someone not shown yet. I was pretty astonished at how Tim Sale was able to fully render the covers for the Dark Victory series in these preliminaries, each of which is less than 2x2 in size, but still have all the information you see in the final covers. Of course these are shown the the frame so I apologize in advance for any degradation of the image quality.

I'd like to show a little more discipline and have a lot more fun this year, though I had plenty of fun showing no discipline at all in 2023. I pushed hard into more modern territory and expanded the number of women and non US artists in my collection pretty signficantly. I think I'd like to step back now and hit a few of the more nostalgia oriented things I am still missing, including some underground artists and just a couple of older comic book and comic strip artists-and perhaps some small upgrades where they make sense.

Some of y’all might remember “Frame it Again Sam” temporary frames. He went out of business a while back so I asked my framer here in Atlanta if he could recreate the frames which allow you to swap out art in a backing board and Mylar (or not if you don’t care or only will have the art up a little while) it takes about two minutes to swap out art and they are made to fit 11x17 art with a little room to spare. I love them! Anyone interested can reach out to me at benno119@gmail.com and I’ll see if I can get him to make a few more. Cost about 275.00 but the ability to have a nice looking frame you can swap out quickly is worth it to me

Here’s a nice Gene Colan pencil page from one of my favorite series-Nathaniel Dusk. The art was printed with color right over the pencils without any inks

I have a number of EC pages. Here is one from my favorite EC artist. Jack Davis went on to a long and hugely prolific career in nearly every type of illustration imaginable, but the first flowering of his genius is still a marvel to behold. Many folks want either his horror or humor work, but the war stories are just as well drawn as this example shows

Just figured I would give this a bump and note that Randy Martin and I will be doing a panel on original art collecting this Friday at 4PM. We will also be hosting our annual art show at Dragon Con on Friday and Saturday all day in Artists Alley,. this one focused on unpublished art so there will be lots of things that most folks haven't seen before. Hope to see some of you there!

By the way, feel free to email me about a meetup or show and tell directly. Benno119@gmail.com.

If you want to meet up at Dragon Con there is a very simple way to do it. The Atlanta area comic art collectors are doing our annual art show in artists alley. This year our theme will be Unseen and Unforgotten-which will be unpublished work or work that is old enough to be "forgotten" by anyone except us! There will be some outstanding material there-lots of preliminary work and commissions that are not online and can only be seen at the show. We would be happy to have a meetup at our booth which like in 2019 will be against the escalators in the back of Artists Alley. If that doesnt work, Randy Martin and I are doing a panel on original art collecting and you are welcome to attend and razz us all you want!! If anyone wants to do some show and tell though-now that is my kinda thing. If you are coming to the show and want to have a show and tell meetup and will be bringing things to show off, I will be happy to bring a few things not in the show just for that purpose-just let me know!! Benno

I havent posted much here, though I certainly have more than a few commission pieces. Here is one from 2013 I was very happy to snag

there is a thread about this!

I currently support a few folks on Patreon and have considered a few more. I support Jeremy Bastian, which is pretty clearly the best deal in town in my opinion, having gotten several original pieces that I adore. I also support Adam Hughes, Joshua Stephens(super indy-was local to Atlanta, now in St. Louis) and Rich Tommaso (good friend, great comic artist doing his own anthology book with the support) Others have posted cool stuff from Jeremy-here is one of mine.

I have several one pagers by Rick Geary done for National Lampoon and other magazines

Here is a twice up cover by Rich Tommaso

Here is am very early John Buscema romance splash.

I am definitely the definition of an old collector (over 60-yikes!) . When I first bought comic art it certainly wasnt for nostalgia-I was buying the stuff I was interested in within a year or two at most after publication. It was only after I started collecting for a while that I began collecting older material, but once I went down that rabbit hole I was hooked. Part of it was simply seeing what kind of material that the folks I liked were influenced by, but that quickly gave way to just looking at things and deciding if I liked them myself. Virtually every piece of comic strip art I have purchased is far outside of any true nostalgia for me. I never read any the things I own other than Bloom County and a few others-but comic strip art is probably a good third of my collection. I have always read comics though. The thing I rarely read is superhero comics. They are full of the same tropes they always have had. The breath of fresh air that the gritty comics of the 70's and 80's brought to the table has long become just another stale formula so my interest in the form for reading purposes has migrated almost entirely to independent books. I collect art from those, but I also buy things from modern artists in the superhero field when I think they are doing something out of the box. I definitely started looking harder at some of the artists Felix Lu represents because I felt like a lot of them were pushing the envelope more than some of the other mainstream guys and that led me to look at some of the Inky Knuckles guys and others. What I try to do is to ask folks I know what they like-especially younger collectors and I have found some fantastic work that way. I don't know if newer collectors will follow the same path, but I suspect that if they enjoy the form, as I do, that they will likely find that there is a lot of material from the past that is of great interest. As the big two begin to slow their production to concentrate on using their IP in movies and games, folks who like comics may well find that the only way to reliably get new things to read, at least in the superhero genre, is to go backwards rather than forwards and that might also influence collecting habits.

Its on folks. The exhibit will be online too, but if you are nearby, you would be foolish not to see it in person. I loaned a fair bit of stuff like my DKR splash, but there is a ton of stuff from the Billy Ireland Museum, some avante garde Belgian work and some private loans from collectors. check it out! https://arts.kennesaw.edu/zuckerman/exhibitions/upcoming_exhibitions.php

Funny, so did I !! :-)

I have the first published piece of comic art I ever got-a 16th birthday gift from my parents (you can see it on the YouTube Video Felix did when I was on his podcast a few years ago) and I honestly cannot remember if the first piece of sketch art I got was a Val Mayerik Conan sketch or if it was a Reed Crandall ERB drawing-I have the Mayerik but not the Crandall. Since it was 45 years ago I will admit I don't have perfect recall. I do have the hand colored print by Gonzalo Mayo colored by Kenneth Smith that I got at the same show because I couldn't cough up the extra $15.00 to get a Frazetta print colored. I also have my tattered copy of Origins of Marvel Comics that Stan Lee signed for free after waiting in a short line-things were definitely different in the summer of 1975. Benno

I was tempted by those two Kirby MM pages and sort of wished I had pushed harder, but apparently unlike many collectors, Covid has clipped my wings on stuff like this. Glad I have some good Kirby already and would be happy to add more, but it will have to wait for another day.

Here is one of my Krenkel preliminary sketches. I think this one was for ERB's At the Earth's Core. Roy did so many drawings for nearly every project that there are variations of all kinds in many cases. I always love looking at his work and the new book is just great-but all of his books are great in my opinion-I never tire of looking at his stuff.