James J Johnson

I always say, leave it to a James to find the deals of the century! We're good like that. We're frugal!

You know who Ted though was the greatest hitter of all time? The Babe. Keep in mind that Ruth used to out-homer entire teams for the season! While usually batting in the .350 to .360s (.344 lifetime). No gear. No steroids. 714 homeruns, with 4000 less at bats than Hank Aaron. Fueled by a diet that would have killed most men, pickled eels, hotdogs, washed down with Old Overhaul! When Wiliiams was in a bating slump, which I guess for Ted was .300 or so, he used to send for Ruth to sit behind home run plate and watch, and critique. There's alot of photos of Ted in uniform with Babe in street clothes, having a pow wow behind the fence around the home plate area, Ruth holding a bat to demonstrate something he saw Ted doing.

It is a deal, isn't it? You make a good point!

The game was so different. Just in random order: 1) Sports medicine and adjunct training and rehab were basically non existent. Back in Ruth's and DiMaggio's days they'd treat injuries with a Raytheon Diathermy Machine, which basically was a 40 watt light bulb behind what looked like drop lamp with a drum skin over it!! 2) Travel. Untold hours to go from here to there by bus and train 3) Hard drinking, horrible nutrition, bad sleeping habits 4) Huge fields compared to today. 490 feet to straightaway center, 50 foot wall at the :Polo Grounds. Original cf fence, 491 feet at Yankee stadium. 5) Very little in the way of relief pitching. Starters usually finished, gas in their tank or not. 6) 18" pitching mound 7) No warnings for throwing at batter's heads! 8) No warnings for sliding into bases, feet kicking, file-sharpened spikes. I can keep going but these ballplayers faced adverse conditions. None were pampered.

What was the retail price for those DF Kirby pieces back then?

There isn't. Ted Williams produced the last .400 batting average season, 79 years ago, because although he might be able to explain "how to bat .400" to someone, only Ted was able to see the ball's flight path and react to it like he could. Autograph authentication used to be the domain of specialists. Someone who knew 1, or 2, or 3, or usually, at the very most, and miraculous in itslef, up to maybe 10 signatures as well as their own. As if they wrote it tens of thousands of times. A specialist's intimacy with a signature he's expert in transcends the small details. A specialist doesn't need an exemplar for comparative authentication. They can glance at one of their areas of specialty and by vibe alone know if it's proper, as if it were their own signature! With PSA, JSA, etc., autograph authentication moved in a different direction. One guy authenticates thousands of signatures using exemplars. "Does this e look like this e, and qre these two letters the same size as these"? That's not the way to authenticate. A specialist immediately can identify fakes from the real thing, due to intensive study and a level of intimacy with the track based on years of study and observation. You don't get that with the jack of al trades exemplar comparison authenticator companies. You get mistakes. And loads of them.

Yes and Yes!!! Both points are extremely valid observations and sound advice.

Yes. That was at least the norm for his signing checks at that time. I'm not sure about other eras though although based on those, what you and I both saw, it's reasonable to believe that his check signatures would likely echo his comic splash page signatures relevant to the time of writing.

What I've heard over and over, from fairly reliable sources, is that the books were dropped off at Jack and Roz' Kirby Kompound, their home, to be picked up once Jack had completed signing them all. Like Kaz, what I've heard from reliable sources is that 2500 signatures would pose an insurmountable challenge for Jack alone to complete within the given timeframe between drop off and pick up during that time in his life..

It is ginormous. Almost bordering on, dare I say it?, Rhinoceran.

Not forged as much as secretarial (Roz). Back in the day a Kirby signature was valued and prized, but nowhere near the vicinity of monetary value as today, and why so many forgeries abound on ebay. Back in the 70s-90s, comic forgeries were almost non-existent. There was no reason to; no dollar incentive. The forgers concentrated on Sports autos and other areas; where the money was.. The market for comic creator signatures skyrocketed after CGC introduced the signature series, much like the market upswing for comics soon after CGC's emergence.

Volume pricing! We forge by the mile. You save by the yard.

In my opinion, he didn't. Just a few years before, the typical tremors; the shaky lines in his signature was becoming more evident, and then with Dynamic Forces, suddenly, the tremors were gone. The leaning, stringy, linear character of his track, low and long /////////////////////////////////////////////////////// suddenly became more vertical and condensed IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. Blockier. Age typically has the opposite effect on handwriting!

Using one of the Dynamic Forces "Kirby" signatures as his exemplar/model, the forger didn't consider what was typical and untypical placement for Kirby. Remember, the Dynamic Forces X-Men 1 books bear the signature typically over art elements without an evidence that care was exercised not to obscure artistic elements of the covers, just like the poster. That, in itself, is not typical of Kirby, and his respect for not defacing his art, even with his signature, is why he almost exclusively signed the artless splash page margin on comics instead of covers.

Precisely. The signature on the poster is at least 2X and probably upwards of 3X the scale of the one signed on the FF 67 if we were to see them overlapped.