Taylor G

Since you asked. I consider visual sequential storytelling, in films and in comics, as the great art form of the twentieth century. Motion pictures have got the artistic recognition they deserve, largely due to scholarship like Cahiers du Cinéma. WIll Eisner in the 1940s understood that comics were another new art form, related to motion pictures. He based his Spirit comics on the visual language of film noir. It's a pity a lot of people, including many people in this hobby, still don't get what Eisner figured out eighty years ago. I say this as prelude to saying, I personally think it is moronic that people collect individual panel pages, from a wide variety of artists. Moronic. That's just my opinion. Why not be known in the hobby as the guy who has the complete pages for story X? By analogy, for those that don't know, it's estimated that three quarters of all silent films are lost completely. Those that we still have are due to film collectors like Kevin Brownlow, who risked criminal prosecution to collect and save these films, sometimes from the original stars like Harold Lloyd who had been forgotten. Here is Brownlow's famous speech accepting an award for his efforts, I recommend taking a look: If you are the collector for a story, at least you are contributing something to the art form, maybe that story will still be available to art historians a hundred years from now because you helped to keep it together. Wouldn't it be nice to be remembered for something in this hobby, instead of having a collection indistinguishable from thousands of other cookie cutter collections? The recent Byrne and Cockrum artist editions contain no complete stories, because Dunbier, despite years of scanning and networking, was not able to find a single complete story by these artists. I understand why sellers break up stories. If you put an entire story up for sale, you're going to have relatively few takers, and more than likely the buyer is going to be some dealer that will turn around and break it up, I've seen that many times. Easier to move it by selling the pages individually. Probably the only thing that keeps whole stories together are private networks of serious collectors who appreciate the importance of keeping these things together, so most of these sales of complete stories are private. Hence the importance of networking with like-minded collectors. I have seen some artists who have not sold their art, and are only interested in selling entire stories, they get it, unlike John Byrne who broke up his stories for beer money. It was gratifying to see the Murphy Anderson Hawkman stories sold whole, even while some here complained that they couldn't get individual pages for their cookie cutter collections. The Anderson family gets it. I must admit, the claim that "breaking up a book is exciting" is a new one, I hadn't heard that one before. It's the buyers I have a problem with. It's clear that for most collectors, original art collecting is just an extension of comic book collecting. It's not about the art form, it's about the personal nostalgic thrill they get from owning a page from a story they read when they were young. One better than having a 9.8 copy of the comic book because "there's only one copy", forgetting that if you miss this Sal Buscema page, hold on, there'll be lots more available next week. So much for "there's only one." I understand that when you first get into the hobby, you can only afford single pages, and everybody wants some variety in their collections, you don't start just buying pages from a single story off the bat. But at some point, I'd hope that people would "grow up" in the hobby and think more meaningfully about what they're trying to accomplish with their collecting. What's the point? Meanwhile I've heard of artists who've tried to get owners to sell their individual pages to people who are putting together stories, and the owners have refused. Nothing trumps their thrill at having one of this artist's pages in their cookie cutter collections. Apologies if I have offended anyone, but the OP asked. I think this hobby has seriously screwed up priorities, and with people moving from comic book collecting into comic art collecting, from one form of atomistic consumerism into another, I expect it to only get worse. How will this hobby be remembered in the future?

With this hobby breaking up stories and scattering the individual pages to oblivion, I was hoping that at least some of this twentieth century art form would be preserved as artists editions. Unfortunately the scans are not 100% faithful reproductions: The Jack Kirby New Gods artists editions is notorious for its mediocre scans. We don't go to art museums to look at lithographs.

For God's sake, there are almost no complete Carol Day stories left (I think there may be one in a museum). If he manages to bring this together, that's historically significant for David Wright's legacy, future fans of this art form won't just have a few scattered isolated strips. Let's encourage this effort, instead of complaining about it. It's not as there are no other storylines from which you can get examples. To the OP, best of luck, you'll need it. I wish there were more efforts like this. I wish more people got it.

CLOSED.

It took people like Truffaut and Goddard to get people to recognize that Hitchcock and Ford were not just putting out mass entertainment, but were actually creating great art. I haven't seen much of a claim like that for comic art, certainly not at the same level of popular acceptance, in part because I think the people trying to make the claim are making the wrong claim. Instead of comparing Kirby (or Frazetta) with Degas or Van Gogh, a better comparison would be Will Eisner's work on the Spirit, where he was explicitly borrowing from the visual language of film noir. There are plenty of other examples. I'd like to see that argument made for comic art as an "art form." Let me try again with the motion picture analogy: Restoration of films consists of reconstructing it from fragments wherever they can find them. If you look at the restored version of Cukor's A Star Is Born, for entire scenes they just use stills where all they have left of the original is the audio. The aesthetic being promoted here is just to collect the best scenes, good enough. Only in this hobby would anyone make such a claim. If a film student were to say to a prof, "I haven't seen Citizen Kane but I've seen the scene where he walked in front of the mirror," he'd be advised to change his major to advertising. Before someone says, We've still got the comics where the stories were printed, I assume people realize that comic restoration without the OA involves people like Mike Kelleher redrawing the art. I'd just like more respect for keeping the stories intact, because in the end it's the only way this art form will be preserved for posterity. Some of it will be preserved in Dunbier's artists editions, but my understanding is that he's now run out of complete stories. The recent Byrne and Cockrum AEs contain no complete stories because he couldn't find any. It was gratifying to see the Murphy Anderson Hawkman stories sold whole by his family, rather than breaking them up as most people would for $$$. It was disappointing to see some people complain that the stories should have been broken up so they could get a page they can afford. Maybe the family thought that preserving the art form was more important than satisfying someone's desire for a nostalgic memento. Buy the comic book if that's what you want.

The great art form of the 20th century was motion pictures. Its great artists were people like Hitchcock and Ford. Comic books are the poor cousin to this art form, but it shares the same visual language. Viewed in this light, the best exemplars of this art form are the stories. Too bad we're breaking them up and scattering them to oblivion. The idea that film clips will someday stand as exemplars of the motion picture art form? Only someone immersed in this hobby would make such a claim. A film restorer like Robert Harris would find this claim laughable, if not offensive.

Please say only nice things about me.

So now it's time to talk about 1984/1994, and to talk about that, we have to talk about Bill Dubay. I think we can presume that Dubay was a complicated guy. I've heard of great things he did as editor, such as trying to get the Warren employees unionized. One of the strengths Warren had going for them was their art production, doing things Marvel could not, and Dubay seems to have had a hand in that. He also wrote some great stories and kept the ship afloat in four stints as editor (being succeeded by, and later succeeding, Louise Jones). Timothy Moriarty, Warren's final editor, recalled him as The 1984 magazine was apparently born from Warren panicking at the success of Heavy Metal, bringing as it did the French New Wave of Moebius and Druillet to American audiences (as well as reprinting American underground work like Corben's Den). Given that Warren's strength was always in their art, one can imagine their worry. So one can understand that the initial idea was to build a competing science fiction magazine, ladled with a bit of spicy sex in the European fashion, using Warren's existing stable of writers and artists. But the problem is that Dubay decided that the key to the success of this magazine was to deliberately stoke controversy in its stories. This meant lots and lots of nudity in the art, drawn by great artists like Jose Ortiz and Jose Gonzalez and Esteban Maroto, some of their best artistic work in fact, in service of stories that were usually puerile and stupid. Unfortunately if that was the only part that was controversial, we could look on it with fondness for a relatively more innocent era, before hardcore pornography became available to any teenager on the internet. But sometimes the controversial stuff went dark. This is what Jim Stenstrum has said of Dubay and the magazine: Now I ask you, how can you resist a magazine after hearing that? In case it is not clear, this will never be collected. There will never be a Dark Horse 1984/1994 Archives. Your only chance to read this legendary material, is to read the original magazines.

By the late 1960s, Warren's revival of EC-style horror anthology comics was running out of steam. Archie Goodwin and many other creators had left the company and it was limping along printing file material. Then someone got inspired by this: Jim Warren and his colleague Forrest J. Ackerman came up with this (costume design by Trina Robbins, cover by you know who): And Warren Publishing entered the 1970s with its trademark horror now leavened with camp and sexiness, perfectly suited to the time.

A quick note for anyone wandering in who is not familiar with Warren magazines: We all know how Congress in the 1950s forced comic publishers to follow the comics code, which forbade comics having vampires and werewolves in their stories! Jim Warren in the 1960s got around the code by making his books magazine-size. They're not comics, see? FWIW in my opinion the Warren horror magazines were better than the pre-code EC comics that they were obviously emulating. Maybe because Warren himself was an artist, you did not have writers Feldstein-style burying the art in big text boxes explaining what the art is already showing you. He also understood the importance of cover art to get noticed on the newsstands, and hired some of the best people in the business to do his covers (most notably, Frank Frazetta). Some of the most expensive comic art sold at public auction originated as cover art for these magazines. The magazines used B&W for the interior art, for obvious cost-saving reasons. But the benefit of that is that some of their artists accomplished amazing things with shading and ink wash, capturing mood and deep contrasts available in monochrome that would have been lost to coloring. Okay, with that out of the way, on with the show....

I will be selling a number of Warren magazines, including Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and even some 1984/1994. The books are generally in mid-grade, with a few higher grade. The usual boilerplate rules for this thread apply: No HoS or Probation list buyers. Payment via Paypal. Shipping via USPS Priority for $12 for the continental United States. Shipping for Canada will be quoted. First in the thread wins and prevails over PM offers. Returns accepted for 14 days after delivery. Feel free to PM with offer or questions. See here for concluding remarks and a question:

CLOSED

I heard somewhere that a 2" crease with no more than 1/2" CB merits a 9.0 (My rule of thumb is to allow up to twice the length of a CB in a non-color breaking crease). I've heard that scratches are considered more critically than creases. So in a cover that is otherwise flat and glossy, what does this 2-1/2" non-color breaking crease do? Not interested in slabbing, more interested in the general grading question. I can do the math, it suggests 8.0, maybe 8.5, but curious what the consensus is. FWIW based on other covers in the lot, I don't think it was pressed. Gratias! ETA The scratch is much more visible in the photo than IRL, where it is only visible when held at an angle under a light.

Suppose I have two copies of a book, A and B. Copy A has a mediocre cover, say 7.0, but the interior is nice. Copy B has a nicer cover, say 8.5, but someone has defaced some of the interior pages. Pornographic doodling, but the pages at least don't stick together. So one thought is to carefully remove staples and attach the good interior pages to the good cover, using the original staples. Is this considered a sin against the CGC gods, inadvisable, kosher, or people do it all the time? I assume the danger is weakening of the cover around the staples, causing a staple pop, which will bring the grade down a couple of levels. But if I have to weigh a staple pop against pornographic defacement of interior pages.....

IMO all newbies to the board should be directed to immediately watch @etanick 40-video tutorial on grading comics. It should be a sticky in the newby forum. Much Much MUCH more useful than the overrated Overstreet grading guide, which violates its own criteria with some of its examples, demonstrating how ridiculous some of its guidelines are. CGC should be directing traffic his way, they owe him that much at least.

I prefer this film to Star Wars. Just a camp classic. Princess Aura had a pet midget. Called Fellini.

I only watched that show for Erin Gray.

You have to wait for #108 for the very very best Gonzalez of Vampi in the nude. This was Anton Caravana, who was dead by the time the issue appeared, a real tragedy.

His writing were suitably obscure you could map any present day to his "prophecies." See the 1938 film that TCM shows, where he predicted Hitler etc.

I believe others have reported on this board that those sprays yellow over time. I remember a video that Wayne Harold and Craig Russell did where they reported something similar.

The best "modern" presentation of this material, outside of the artists editions. I prefer the B&W, there's a strong (and conscious) film noir sensibility to the work.

Will amuse children for hours.....and when they get bored with it, they can eat it. Also, worth noting under the circumstances, a great vector for transmitting diseases (Ebola spread by monkeys in the Congo for example).