glendgold

I also really like that there's a LITERAL flip in the page. It's meta. I feel this panel could be this thread's mascot.

All these other attempted flips are puny - see how the master swings at a 33333333% return, or something, with just one little tiny word. https://www.ebay.com/itm/133878906609?hash=item1f2bcdfef1%3Ag%3AyisAAOSwVf5hIVWq&nma=true&si=2V%2FRHt32Iz5G%2BmwGNIwtGAdL5kI%3D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557 https://www.ebay.com/itm/234237154020?hash=item36899f52e4:g:IoIAAOSwel1hZ~Bw7

I would have ignored this seller, as anyone scanning his other stuff (shipping is only $10 worldwide from Poland!) would see all the other fakes by the usual suspects, but in addition to his other fake Kirbys, here's smiley-face Galactus, copied not from (I think) Kirby but Byrne (maybe?). He's kind of adorable. Look at his sheepish lil' smile! Aw, he's not so bad, he's just misunderstood. https://www.ebay.com/sch/art_for_life/m.html?_trksid=p3692

It was never up. That was a photoshopped joke story. And I'm sure that now a bunch of people believe it, the way people believe that Tim Burton bought -- oh, wait, maybe I won't keep that 25 year old joke going. (FWIW, back in 1996 or so two early Kirby pages from books no one has otherwis seen a page from showed up for sale - no one seems to have seen them in person, the seller was obscure, and then the sale was consummated (maybe) with an unknown buyer that someone joked was probably Tim Burton. And so eve since...)

I think that guessing an amount legitimizes the donkey show. "I wonder if it sold for XX" becomes "Didn't I hear it sold for XX?" eventually. I'll go as far as this speculation: I wonder if it sold.

Have any of you read that Damon Runyon short story where there's this craps game in an alleyway and the guy running it says he's going to have the largest payout in New York history, so all these guys show up, and when they ask where the dice are, he says he'll throw them himself, and he rolls the dice - in his overturnd hat, behind his back. And then he picks up his hat, looks really close, and announces what each person rolled, and tells them none of them won the pot. I can't remember the name of the story, and was hoping someone here did. No particular reason.

I don't know much about most of those categories but can attest that both the wine and the book are problematic, the equivalent of a B+ piece of art. They're exactly the names you recognize (DRC! Gatsby!) with little asterisks that the people who actually drive those markets know to avoid.

A few auctions ago, I was watching the live feed and my cat walked across the keyboard before I could hit "disable live bidding." Maybe two bidders with two cats?

I'm going to be thinking about this comparison for a while - wine is my other money-wasting hobby, and so far I haven't learned much from one hobby that applies to the other, except some stuff is overhyped and some stuff slips through the cracks. The prices over in that other hobby are fueled, as here, by people with infinite money, and the rest of us chase QPR, quality to price ratio. There's gotta be an OA QPR lesson here but I haven't had enough coffee to apply it yet. "It's cheap but it speaks to me" is where it starts, I guess.

Mitch is so hardcore he LIKES Mondays.

I mean it's no color guide, but still...

it's funny - I remember reading this comic as a kid and thinking 'Oh, he's doing the extraneous splashes thing again' because I was an insufficiently_thoughtful_person. This is such a fantastic piece of work - so concrete, and yet every individual line comes off as almost abstract. Look at all the crazy textures and patterns that go into making up a couple of bust shots. Really cool.

I could recognize Jack Kirby art before any other artist, and then I could distinguish among Kirby's inkers long before I could even tell John and Sal Buscema's pencilling apart. He co-created Captain America and had him sock Hitler in the jaw a year before the US joined the war. He created the Boy Commandos, the Sandman, then the entire genre of romance comics. (Weirdlly, right before then, he killed Nazis. Like: lots of Nazis. Then romance comics. Weird, right?) Then he co-created the Marvel universe, then he gave DC 40 years of source material, and oh yeah, he did one of the first creator-owned comics. And then there's the artwork. You might not like it (but if not, that the hell are you doing reading so deeply into this paragraph?) but if you do comics, you sort of have to reckon with it, reject it or embrace it, but learn from it. Anyway - Happy 104th, Jack.

Wow, I hadn't noticed that - good eye!

So: no, this is a copy of one of Jack's New Gods presentations pieces, and if you were wondering how Jack's work ended up in Poland, you might ask the same of Watterson, Peter Max, Miro, Bob Kane, etc. https://www.ebay.com/itm/255103062980?hash=item3b6553d3c4:g:RyYAAOSw6qxg7IGK https://www.ebay.com/sch/art_for_life/m.html?item=255103062980&mkcid=7&bu=43188547830&emsid=e11021.m43.l1120&euid=bdc4438ed9b848afacae7a42a12e89d7&crd=20210822032345&sojTags=ch%3Dch%2Cbu%3Dbu%2Cut%3Dut%2Cosub%3Dosub%2Ccrd%3Dcrd%2Csegname%3Dsegname%2Cchnl%3Dmkcid&ch=osgood&osub=-1~1&segname=11021&mkpid=0&ut=RU&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562 I wouldn't have bothered linking (we are living through a time of waaaay too many forgeries to keep up with), but dude already sold a "Kirby" Hulk, so someone is going to be sad. The broad line work on these isn't the worst I've seen, but he lacks confidence in the detail work.

Start your engines. It's open.

Yes! This is a great resource - thanks for linking to it. Authors do get paid, too.

This would be a good place to remind you that if you want to support artists like Watterson or other studs, give a thought to using literally any other website or brick-and-mortar store than amazon, which spends a diabolical amount of time cooking up ways to keep guys like him (and me) from getting paid. If you don't already know about their shenanigans, it's too much of a thread drift to explain here, but the short version is if you click on "buy" on a book there's literally no way to know if a royalty will actually go to the artist or if it's going into Bezos's stubby little Blue Origin tailpipe. Much better idea is to buy from your local independent bookseller (whose presences online and in person are laid (lain?) out right here: https://www.indiebound.org/ or your local comics shop: https://www.comicshoplocator.com/

Aw, shoot, I was working on my Captain Princess costume for Halloween.

I am kind of delighted that HA is identifying this cover as "Captain Princess," because that would be a pretty amazing superhero name. https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/frank-frazetta-the-people-that-time-forgot-captain-princess-cover-painting-original-art-a/p/7246-220001.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515

Anyone who knows Buscema can correct me here, but I was under the impression that John did a few SS 1 recreations -- but every time he moved the position of the Earth. Is that right?

There's a reason for that. Here's the original version.

Intrigued to see what the description of this one will be. Signed by Kirby, but isn't this Romita? Then again it looks like the coloring is by Kirby. I know those Marvelmania posters have oddball stories behind them, and that there are several versions of this (one definitely by Jack and one definitely by JR), but I am fuzzy on the details.

Ah, geez, I bought this from Howard Lowery's auction in 1994 for $450 and sold it the next year for $750, I think, and I felt like a GENIUS.