paqart

My question btw, applies to any set of equal value comics. I was thinking of it primarily in the context of modern newsstand edition comics. I have about 1,500 of those, most published in the 2001-2013 time frame. The values I see attached to them are quite high in some cases, and I find myself thinking I'd rather have the value in a GA or SA comic.

CMA isn't restored. I say "apparent" because it isn't graded, so it's what it looks like to me. In the CGC grading contests btw, I consistently grade Golden Age comics about .5 to 1.0 lower than CGC. This CMA is the nicest looking GA comic I've ever owned, condition-wise, and that includes GA comics I bought in the 1970's, when they weren't nearly as old as they are today. The cover even still has some gloss.

The Flash Gordons are a lot better than the Fawcett material. I assume he got better later, just as other artists did. For instance, Carl Barks is my favorite comic book artist, but I have a hard time getting excited about his first comic, Four Color 9, because he hadn't developed his style yet. I feel the same about early Kirby, but they often have Schaffenberger covers to make up for his inexperience in the first couple of years.

Here's my emoji: I don't know if it's good or bad, which means it's probably bad. A lightning bolt without the cloud and rain would probably be good. This, I think, means "whoops" big time. When grading previous contests, I almost always graded everything one point less than the actual grade. For that reason, I went with my high estimates this time. And now I'm remembering that grading on moderns tends to be stricter than for the GA material we've been grading until now.

I've always liked MP1 but recently discovered the Captain Marvel family of comics and have been targeting them. For what they are, they are seriously underpriced. As an added bonus, I recently realized that C.C. Beck is one of the best GA artists, though his contemporary at Fawcett, Mac Raboy, gets all the attention. My opinion, Raboy isn't even that good, let alone brilliant, but his covers suck up all the collector dollars, leaving the Becks very affordable.

I was looking at the wrong grade for the CMA price. In 8.5 it's about $400, but more like $2k in 9.0. So just pretend it's an 8.5 for this example.

I have an LCS whose owner seems to prefer silver age Marvels to anything else, regardless of value. That is, if value is equal, he seems more willing to buy SA Marvel than anything else. I was just thinking about this in the context of my collection and wondered which of the following comics, of approximately equal value, are most appealing: CGC 9.6 X-Men 266 CGC 9.4 Hulk (2008) #1 newsstand edition CGC 8.5 Marvel Premiere #1 Raw (app. CGC 9.4) Captain Marvel Adventures #30 I'd put them in reverse chronological order for preference, making the CMA 30 the most appealing, followed by the MP 1, then X-Men 266, and last, the Hulk. And yet, the Hulk is easily the rarest of the group, and all are worth in the $350-$500 range.

An example of the difference between Raboy and Beck, with two similar covers. The biggest difference to me, and a typical difference between Raboy and Beck, is that Raboy does not integrate his figures with the perspective of the scene, but Beck does. This is typical of artists don't understand perspective well enough to make the best use of their photo reference. It is also typical of artists who use photo reference of models in their studio, or even drawings of models in a studio. This trait is most easily spotted when the artist uses three-point perspective, characterized by an overhead view looking down, as in both of these covers. In the Beck cover, though the effect is subtle, Captain Marvel is clearly oriented so that his feet are closest to the "camera" and his left fist is furthest from the camera. In the Raboy cover, every part of Captain Marvel jr.'s body is equidistant from the virtual lens, as if he were a specimen on a glass slide under a microscope. Every cover I've ever seen by Raboy and Beck are like these: the Raboy's feature characters that appear to be mounted on glass slides parallel to the camera's viewing plane, and Beck's have characters that are integrated with the perspective of their environment. This is not a small thing, because it highlights the lack of a fundamental art skill in Raboy's case, and the presence of it in Beck's. This particular metric is one of the easiest ways to spot artists who never fully understood how to draw in perspective. The second issue, less easy to spot in these covers, is the lighting. While it is possible to have multiple light sources cast shadows from different directions, it is unusual to see that in a daylight landscape, like in these covers. The little rocket held by Captain Marvel Jr. has a highlight indicating a small light source above and to the right of Captain Marvel Jr. The battleship below him has shadows indicating a large light source (the sun) above and to the left of Captain Marvel Jr. The lighting on Captain Marvel Jr. indicates a broad light source roughly centered on his figure and slightly above his head. This type of mistake is common among comic book artists, but Beck never does it. In the Whiz cover by Beck, the shadows on Captain Marvel are consistent with the cast shadows on the island below. A secondary related point is that the density of shadows on the Whiz covers are consistent, but they are inconsistent in the Captain Marvel Jr. cover. The battleship has solid filled blacks, Captain Marvel Jr.'s body has fine soft edges leading to narrow solid blacks, and the rocket has nothing but soft feathered shading. There are artists who use photo reference well, capably integrating characters and environments, like David Mazzuchelli. Others, like Raboy, Starlin, Sinkevitch, and Alex Ross, are much less successful. The reason it is easiest to see this with three point perspective is that a bird's eye view is more difficult to simulate by photographing a model than a more conventional perspective. Most artists don't have a way to physically get above their model to make such an image. This is irrelevant to artists like Beck (or Gil Kane, Romita Sr and Jr, Johnny Craig, Jack Davis, etc) because they understand both perspective and structure. And that leads us to structure. Beck has mastered this, but Raboy clearly hasn't. An easy way to illustrate this is to imagine the difference between a circle and a sphere. Lazy artists, and those who don't know the difference, or artists in a rush, will use a circle template or a compass to represent a sphere. This is wrong for a reason that should be readily apparent. A circle is a cross-section of a sphere, but cannot represent a sphere accurately because a sphere bulges equally in all directions from its center. Thanks to perspective, this means that the circular cross section is distorted at the center, creating a subtle bulge. C.C. Beck is aware of this, as is evident in the way he draws his characters. Despite their simple outlines, he always takes into account the volume of the structures he draws. Raboy (and most other artists, even those that understand perspective well) don't do this. For that reason, Beck's figures appear more fully rounded than Raboy's, which are flat in comparison. This is also visible in the way each artist draws rounded objects in perspective. Beck's drawing of twisted train tracks, for instance, beautifully retains the volume of the curved metal rails as they twist around each other. I have a hard time believing Raboy could have drawn this as well unless he had a sample of twisted tracks to draw. This is the reason perspective is so important to comic book artists. Without that knowledge, you become reliant on the exact camera angles and state of an object's structure as seen in photo reference. If you understand structure and perspective, you can invent things, such as the twisted train tracks. Next, we come to the compositions. Here, Beck's advantage over Raboy is that he exhibits considerably more variety than Raboy, he cycles about three or four basic compositions, many of which are so similar they could be mistaken for each other, as in Master Comics 18 and 34. Look at the difference between Beck's covers and notice how he changes camera angle as needed, and how in each case, the subject in front of the camera is doing something more interesting than anything found in a Raboy cover. Last, another issue related to lighting. In photography, it takes considerable knowledge and skill to light a subject favorably. It takes almost no skill to light a subject so that his or her image is visible to the camera. The latter type of image is often described dismissively by professional photographers as a "snap shot". Meaning, no effort went into crafting the image. The lighting in Raboy's covers resembles snapshots more than professional photographs, which is what Beck's work looks like. This is particularly evident in the cover of Master Comics 45, where Raboy's carefully drawn shadows mar the face of Captain Marvel Jr. Beck never does anything like this, but Raboy does it fairly often, though rarely as obviously as in this particular cover. When I worked for Sony Pictures as an art director, I let an artist go (a very highly paid artist) because he made the kinds of mistakes Raboy makes in every drawing. In his place, I hired Dan Spiegle who was much better. It is possible to make excellent covers and interior art regardless of drawing errors. Jack Kirby is an exceptional example of this, as is Matt Baker, both of whom capitalized on their strengths (action and GGA, respectively), to deflect attention from their weaknesses (Kirby's frequent use of multiple perspectives in the same frame, Baker's shortcomings in anatomical knowledge and perspective). In the end, not only do I prefer Beck to Raboy, I prefer almost any artist to Raboy because the exact suite of problems found in Raboy's art represent all of the qualities that make an artist a poor choice for sequential art. It doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't work in the industry, nor that they can't be successful, but they go into it with serious handicaps. Their saving grace, as with Raboy, is often their inking style combined with a static minimum standard of artistic fidelity met by slavish use of photo reference to maintain carrect proportions in all characters. The good news for me is that Raboy's popularity make Beck's work that much more affordable to me.

That CMA 18 is fantastic. It's on my want list. Same for number 132. The thing about Beck is that he is very capable of creating a compelling cover. Carl Barks is more of a "cartoonist" because he focuses on the story to the exclusion of all else. His covers are sometimes excellent, like FC 199 (my favorite), but usually amount to well-drawn gags. I think Beck is better than Barks at cover illustration, though Barks is, in my opinion, the best comic creator to have ever worked in the medium. Raboy, I class with any number of of temporarily hot artists, whose work was different from others of their period for a little while, but who didn't add much to the medium, like Gray Morrow or Joe Quesada.

As illustrations, I much prefer Beck's covers to Raboy's. Within Raboy's own work, I much prefer his Flash Gordon material to what he did for Fawcett. Like Jim Starlin, I think Raboy is over-rated. For instance, Frank Brunner's inking style is similar to what Raboy did on Flash Gordon, but Brunner's compositions are much more dynamic. I think of Raboy as a cartoonist, not an illustrator, to the extent those two titles can be separated. The reason is that his sequential art never rises to the level of finish demanded of an illustration. Few comic book artists ever manage to do that, but some have: Frazetta, Mark Shultz, Jeff Jones, Bernie Wrightson, Richard Corben, and Jean Giraud (Moebius) are examples of some who have. The distinction you are making is, I think, different. You may be referring to the quality of "realism" where Beck is in the middle of a spectrum where George Herriman's Krazy Kat is on one end, and Alex Ross on the other. On that scale, Raboy is more realistic than Beck, but that doesn't make him more of an illustrator. Plenty of illustrators make highly unrealistic and even sketchy or loose illustrations. The more realistic an illustration becomes, the less aesthetically appealing it is to me. This is because realism often comes with greater dependence on reference and less compositional flexibility. This is largely because the artists known for realism tend to not understand structure as well as their non-realist counterparts, and cannot make up more dynamic poses, camera angles, or settings. Also, an argument can be made that Beck is more realistic than Raboy. The biggest difference between the two is that Beck mostly ignores lighting, but Raboy emphasizes it. However, Beck emphasizes structure, and I think does so more successfully than Raboy's lighting. The best treatment of lighting I've ever seen by a comic book artist is Bernie Wrightson, with David Mazzuchelli a close second. The problem with lighting in comics is that the convention of black outlines, shadows, and shading works against any level of realism. Black, or even near black, is so rare in any natural environment, even on objects painted black, that it's use in comics immediately reduces their realism. Personally, I find Carl Barks, a "cartoonist" capable of far more "realistic" art than Raboy, an "illustrator." The reason is that the way Barks' duck characters interact with their environments is far more convincing than in Raboy's work, regardless of his use of shadow, because of the way he composes his images.

I just bought three over the last few days. The reason is that I suddenly realized what a good artist C.C. Beck is. It's amazing how under-rated he is. Other collectors can have the Mac Raboy covers. Beck's draghtsmanship reminds me of industrial design. For the level of detail, it's perfect and has more volume per line than anyone out there. At this moment, my two favorite GA artists are Carl Barks and C.C. Beck. For SA, probably Carl Barks and Jack Kirby, then Gil Kane and Johnny Romita in BA. As for the stories, I happen to like them. They are refreshing in contrast to the bleak, dark, and sadistic material that has become so popular since Miller's Dark Knight came out and changed comics for the next 40 years. I also like the fact they aren't filled with all the weirdness found in 1950's horror comics. It's no surprise they outsold Superman; they're more family-friendly than anything outside of Disney, with all the adventure craved by readers of superhero comics.

I'm thinking of buying the comic in the attached image. My question is whether it is a UK edition or a UK reprint. My guess is that it is a b&w reprint on the inside. Anyone know which?

My latest, and favorite CPV, Archie Annual #8

I'm in.

This is an interesting angle that may have merit. I appreciate the apparent goal of CGC's apparent efforts, but if those efforts have 1) aggravated the harm at the same time as 2) blocking an alternate remedy that 3) prevents law enforcement scrutiny of the fraud, then that could be a legitimate complaint against CGC to increase damages.

I got a DM saying my grades were recorded for the last round, but they didn't make it to this spreadsheet. I didn't win, but did pick up 10 points on the last round, for a final score of 38, tying for 16th place.

Me too. Here is a link to my Tour-themed graphic novel in progress, "The Lanterne Rouge." https://www.paqart.com/comics-2/the-lanterne-rouge

That's how I feel about Avengers #93 (my first Marvel), but my favorite story was the Thing gladiator series from FF 90-94.

I haven't shot CGC slabs, but have shot some cards with the same problem, photography-wise.

My wife experienced this in the probate case for her grandfather's estate. Her aunt had managed to come into possession of most of the estate's most valuable items (and cash), claimed to have been stolen by her grandfather just before he died. This resulted in a will contest. Fairly soon after it started, everything halted to give people time for settlement. It never happened. Her grandfather died in 2003. The case was resolved around 2021.

Am I too Late?

Last night I pulled out my FF Annual 6 for a read. I enjoyed the experience so much that I grabbed a few other FFs, starting with issue 130. Again, it was fun, but my 133 is in a slab, so I couldn't finish the story.

I hate to say it, but I'm starting to prefer raw comics, particularly for the most valuable issues. I have a hard time picturing myself buying something like an Avengers 1 in a slab, for fear it was a counterfeit. It hadn't occurred to me until reading this thread, but the slabs invite counterfeiting by concealing comic book interiors.

I once owned a Feature Book NN ( Tracy) that was so brittle, you could barely touch it without the pages turning to dust. It really couldn't be read, but would have looked great in a CGC holder. That was probably the only way to preserve and enjoy it.

If only the MCU could go back to the pre-Disney days, when they still had respect for the characters.