glendgold

Good ol' Sterankok.

These images are amazing and i'm going to look at them for a while. I'm unclear on what issues you mean, however. Why can't some pieces be shared?

https://wjactv.com/news/local/bottle-works-to-feature-exhibit-honoring-local-comic-book-artist Looks like they have photocopies on the wall made from original artwork the family now holds, including ASM 5 and 38, books we've long heard rumors of Ditko owning. Also Rom and Charlton stuff. If anyone's in the area, check it -- and the play (!!!) -- out and let us know how it is. http://bottleworks.org/hometown-heroes-steve-ditko-exhibit/

The Ditko covers that have come up for sale so that unwashed people like me know about them are #11, 28 and 30. The first two are especially cool but they aren't going on a top 20 list. The Sinnott family has some FF 51 interiors, but not the splash - that's in a private collection. Joe also held onto the FF 95 interior splash with the Thing holding up the building. 5 stars, but not a top 20 piece.

Who are these "fair-minded people" to whom you refer? BRING THEM TO ME. 4 > 1 Crumb Zap 0 But that Frazetta WSF 29 rules over the rest. As a Kirby guy, I very much want something by him to be in that top ten, but 90% of his A+ stuff is still missing. And are we just doing books? Because there are strips. The McCay Walking Bed is out there, which should make the list.

Here's a special one. You get a photocopy of 1/2 of Jack's Demon Heimdall model sheet as well as a Steranko Branko photocopy of a piece that Joel Thingvall owns. I have always loved Branko's work and find his suggestion of a swinging holiday not at all creepy. https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/original-pencil-drawings-jack-kirby-branko-145-c-B044617993

Fun trivia about this cover: if you hold it up to the light you can see that the white out is covering up how Jack originally drew Doom holding a stick of dynamite.

I dunno, I kinda thought, maybe, the way the art, y'know, looks might have some impact on whether you wanted to, uh, look at it, but you can all just okayboomer me out the door if necessary.

Sigh. You guys who don't know what's going on with this page are overthinking it and people in the know aren't telling you, so let me just say the situation is unique, and you can't extrapolate to other Smith X-Men pages. And I'm probably not supposed to spell this out for confidentialty reasons, but here are the facts: in the year 2300, it was finally calculated that the world's oceans boiled over and the atmosphere became unbreathable due to a chain of events that began when X-Men 172 p. 7 sold for only 37 bucks in the June 2021 HA weekly auction. So two agents were sent back in time to bid the thing up to save humanity. It worked and the grain harvests will continue unabated. I know you're all relieved.

C'est dégueulasse! Also, it's very nice that you're reporting it, but ebay couldn't give a flying intercourse about fraudulent artwork. This will keep showing up for the rest of our lives, so the best thing to do is just try to tolerate it and learn to live with it. Like herpes.

This is one of the most curious Kirby pin-ups I've seen. Almost every character's pose, separately, would be cool corner box art, but when you see them together they make a strange repetition of form (see how The Thing and Thor are bookending each other? There's a lot of that). Esquire must have given him some oddball art direction. And I think that's a Marie Severin Hulk face. HA seems to have dropped the Sinnott inks attribution.

Hope this isn't behind a paywall. If so, short version is: Stan's a simple guy; legacy is complicated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stan-lee-true-believer-review/2021/02/18/5e9f4fc4-71e4-11eb-b8a9-b9467510f0fe_story.html

Ah. That would explain why everything is signed within the margins. If you want to know more about Max Anderson, read the bio of Stan by Abraham Reisman that came out this year: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612238/true-believer-the-rise-and-fall-of-stan-lee-by-abraham-riesman/

This is exactly what I say in my Tinder profile.

I feel these are Flight of the Concord lyrics.

Mmmm...I'm not 100% sure how much time he saved on this particular page by not drawing Thor's face. What do you think?

Here are some no-face Thor examples. There are plenty of others. I feel like he was doing this on purpose but I have no idea what it was. Since Jack grew up beating the daylights out of other guys, and in adulthood saw all kind of hand-to-hand combat, I always look for what kind of experience he brings to fight scenes. Battle being so intense it overwhelms your identity? No idea. But it's a motif for some reason.

Wait, how many fists? https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/harvey-kurtzman-two-fisted-tales-18-cover-original-art-ec-1950-/p/7244-255001.s?ic4=ListView-Thumbnail-071515

Right! And the page to the right was one I was going to post once I shook off my general jaded laziness. That's what I mean about Thor's face. For some reason, Jack would do that in fight scenes - not necessary showing him from behind, just having his face obscured, for multiple panels. There are plenty of other examples and I'd post them but see sentence #1.

Having just taken a swing through the book to see what you're talking about, the action is pretty great, the inks are pretty awful (I am not an automatic Vinnie basher - I have a couple of 5-star Thor pages he inked), and it's a classic issue but holy cats there shouldn't be a premium on the art just because the logo changed. The question I have is whether this is one of those pages where Jack chose, for whatever reason to not show Thor's face. I've noticed in Thor battle pages, in particular, Jack often kept us from seeing his expression. No idea what was up with that (genius is hard sometimes) but he did it in this issue a few times. That would impact my valuation.

Cool pieces. I've seen a couple of those progressives over the years, but few silver age hand colored pieces like that. No opinion on price, but a couple of questions - is that hand colored piece water damaged? Looks like the top and logo are bleeding. And is that Romita's signature or Stan Goldberg IDing the artist?

I mean, honestly, of all the pages Gene drew at the time - of all the Iron Man pages he drew, even -- this is...ehhh. It's fine. It's a bit static. It's based on Don Heck's version, which is the definition of static, and it doesn't feel inspired. I like the first panel and what it is (an origin page) is more valuable than the actual panels, which are pretty pedestrian. Is it worth that moolah? When I was 17 years old I was on a camping trip, walking along a valley floor on Santa Cruz Island, single file with my classmates, and I felt this revelation settling down on me, so I yelled out, "I just realized that money doesn't really exist!" Ever since then I've been waiting for the world to catch up but it's been pretty lonely, to tell the truth.

When I saw that image, I thought, "Wow, George Lucas would like this."

Yeah, that's not where I was going with it at all. I have a friend who is very good at teasing out threads of who-did-what, and as he's an artist and writer himself, he made a point that folks who haven't done a lot of artistic collaboration tend to be way more absolutist than folks who have. When two people work together, there's a third artist in the room, some kind of angel that make the finished work have an integrity it wouldn't otherwise have. I recognize the impossibility of parsing the nuances, even if you had a camera and tape recorder going at the time it was all getting worked out. Anyway, this came up because of something Tom Brevoort was examining, and it spells out a possible way FF 1 might have been composed: https://tombrevoort.com/2020/05/24/lee-kirby-more-thoughts-on-fantastic-four-1/

Can you post these examples? They sound fascinating. And if I understand what you were looking for, I'd say I always assumed that Stan didn't write in notes when it was Marvel Method - that there was a verbal story conference, the artist drew it, and then Stan's contribution would be to write the narration directly in the dialogue balloons; no notes necessary. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong. I reviewed that Reisman book for the WaPo, and really enjoyed it. I think for, uh, dedicated folks like ourselves its analysis of what Stan actually did doesn't turn up much new information, but it does get all the evidence that's been scattered around in between two covers, so that's useful.