glendgold

To the OP's question: do you have the Kirby Checklist? https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=123_139_145&products_id=640&zenid=fea62e08e65dd7d5b4415b9b2d6e6b23 I find that it really helps track down oddball work. If you want to make the bigger investment, get the update: https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=95_97&products_id=1361&zenid=fea62e08e65dd7d5b4415b9b2d6e6b23 Professor Kublak - including this sketch - shows up there. I don't see anything to make me suspicious about it (though I'm not 100% sure what's going on at the bottom - is he turning invisible? Did Jack just not finish?Did something get erased?). It's a cool piece. I know some long-time Kirby fans who were interested in it.

I wish that were always true, but there's a whole thread now about fake Shusters that suggest the diligence is spottier than they admit. Agree about eBay.

I *think* it's real - it's been reproduced elsewhere, iirc. As far as price, It's not insane and there seem to be bids. There's not a ton of Golden Age Kirby out there, and this is a cool oddity. Like Terry says, too bad about the condition.

Yeah, educational. Thanks for the link.

That was actually me registering surprise - when I saw the two images show up on CAF I thought it was the same piece, having sold twice. Took a second for me to realize they were different.

Those are different pieces. Whoever did them wasn't trying to do a line for line recreation (look at Supes's motion lines; count the windows in the building). But the lettering - okay, this is amateur forensics - looks like the same person did it each time.

Just did a "Joe Shuster" search through CAF - I dont know how to tell real Shusters from fake, but here's a Superman 1 color recreation credited to him, apparently sold a couple years ago: https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=1393877 How does this look to folks who know stuff?

The loop that this all ends up with is "The experts don't know anything but I do," and that way of thinking isn't exactly in retreat these days.

Thanks for your info, Rich. You're right - true knowledge is getting lost. It's disappointing when people rely on their guts instead, and might write things like "Joe would never sign a piece of art he didn't draw" without any understanding of how, yeah, he did. History is a lot weirder than people think.

Holy cow, that Mars Mason story might be the most insane comic I've ever seen. And I wrote the intro to the Fletcher Hanks book. Let's just start with the fact that NO MAIL GETS DELIVERED, to begin with.

I'm sure it comes down to which stories you'd like to see deconstructed - they're both pretty impressive. The small sized one is all Sinnott inks, and the art looks amazing -- it's all mature Silver Age Kirby-- but I'm very slightly fonder of the large-sized book, as you can track Jack's changing storytelling from 1962 to 1966. Neither is a tragedy to own.

In fact -- here's a $395 Gene Colan piece which I had Steve Leialoha ink. You might note that Gene, as required by some internal law I would never question, gave Doom one leg. And the raven over Doom's shoulder? One leg.

And I answered that ad, and the one before ($325) and the one before that ($250). Those prices were bargains back then, too.

I bid just the right amount on that one. Speaking of impossible to value: Palmer lightboxed a lot of Gene's cover pencils (and some of Kane's on ToD). Apologies for the ancient scan. The discoloration in the center is an result of joining smaller scans. I was lucky enough to buy this a while ago - lucky also because I knew what it was and the owner priced it accordingly. This looks a lot like the cover to HtD 12, and it...is? Was supposed to be? This is the cover Tom lightboxed and sent back to Marvel. It got lost in the mail, so Tom had to lightbox it a second time, and that's what got published. (Because it always works this way, the second Palmer lightbox - i.e. the published one, but also sorta kinda a recreation of the original cover - had just shown up at auction so I had a sense of what the market thought the published version was worth.) So this is an unpublished, lightboxed cover, and it's also the original version of the cover, but it's not the pencil cover, which I would value higher than either of the lightboxed versions. Whew. I value my unpublished lightbox at eleventy jillion dollars.