A Dealer's Pricing 1 1

[comix4fun]

On 1/6/2018 at 2:29 PM, Rick2you2 said:

That has to be a little harsh. In a few conversations, with one of them, he was very pleasant to talk to.

And Satan makes a damn fine grilled cheese.....

 

[comix4fun]

9 hours ago, Nexus said:

This was just brought to my attention, since I rep the artist.

This Paul Pope piece was sold at HA in Aug 2017:

https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/paul-pope-escapo-french-edition-splash-page-illustration-original-art-c-1998-/a/7166-93456.s?ic3=ViewItem-Auction-Archive-ArchiveSearchResults-012417&lotPosition=0|9#

It's now on Cool Lines:

http://www.comicartfans.com/ForSaleDetails.asp?ArtId=583124

I can confirm that Paul did not re-ink the piece.

That piece has been utterly defaced and destroyed. 

Fricken Philistines playing Mad Scientist in their hidden volcano lair rendering unique pieces of art permanently ruined. 

 

[NinjaSealed]

9 minutes ago, comix4fun said:

That piece has been utterly defaced and destroyed. 

Fricken Philistines playing Mad Scientist in their hidden volcano lair rendering unique pieces of art permanently ruined. 

 

Yup, it maddens me infinitely more when it is a piece that I love, bid on and wasn't too far off the winning bid(like this piece.)

[comix4fun]

6 hours ago, Rick2you2 said:

Because of what I do for a living (I'm a lawyer, which I had publicly mentioned), I really can't respond. I don't want what I might privately think to be taken in an inappropriate manner.

 

Sure you can. You're allowed to have an opinion and you're allowed to speak truthfully. As long as you identify your opinions as what they are, there's nothing stopping you. 

[comix4fun]

12 hours ago, NinjaSealed said:

Yup, it maddens me infinitely more when it is a piece that I love, bid on and wasn't too far off the winning bid(like this piece.)

You've got to wonder. What kind of voice in one's head leads someone to mess with unique pieces of artwork like that...

 

Edited January 8, 2018 by comix4fun

[tth2]

2 hours ago, comix4fun said:

 

Sure you can. You're allowed to have an opinion and you're allowed to speak truthfully. As long as you identify your opinions as what they are, there's nothing stopping you. 

Maybe he's DB's lawyer.

[Rick2you2]

9 hours ago, comix4fun said:

 

Sure you can. You're allowed to have an opinion and you're allowed to speak truthfully. As long as you identify your opinions as what they are, there's nothing stopping you. 

Of course I have opinions. Defacing artwork sucks. Misattribution is misrepresentation, and if intentional, it may be fraud.

Let me add that including decals may not qualify as defacement or material misrepresentation if it doesn't actually affect the underlying art and if the decal itself is not part of the art. But, I still don't like it. 

What I don't want to do is comment with certainty about specific facts. They can sound terrible, but there may be another side to the story. 

[ESeffinga]

I can add a first hand perspective to this Pope tale, as that was a piece I really really wanted when it came up on Heritage, but life happened and I missed the auction. So when the DBs posted the piece to their site I was gutted. I also thought, man theyy did a number on that piece in Photoshop to desaturate the sepia areas and make it look much darker and so contrasty... but then I've seen that happen with many sellers in the past. I don't like it, but it's not unheard of. I just usually ask about it up front, like everything that gives me pause.

 

I've been around a LONG time and have always been aware of the brothers' stories. Up to that point I'd only ever asked about pieces here and there, and pretty much to a piece, every price was roughly 300% of it's recent street price. And nothing I'd ever asked after was worth that markup (to me). But after a week or so of stewing on it, and much internal hand wringing, I shot an email over to the Coolines website.

 

I only ever spoke with Steve... though when I asked about the Pope piece, as if on cue, the response was that the piece was of course his brothers. And so my questions had to be put to him, though Rich and I never actually spoke.

 

Anyway, so I asked after 2 things. I asked if the piece had ever been worked on (I mean the scan sure did look darker than I remembered it). I mentioned to Steve about Paul's use of the brush pens that tend to fade to a sepia tone, and are present on pretty much all the work from this period. I told him I expected the piece had areas of faded inkwork, and others would be rich and black from use of india ink. Also potentially present might be some marker or other stuff. Paul really was using a lot of tools in the early years. So I told Steve that I didn't mind if the piece was faded, but I absolutely wouldn't accept a piece of art that had been worked on.

 

In response to my questions about any potential restoration work having been done on it, he said he thought there might have been some tape on the back at one point, but it appeared that it had been carefully removed with no signs of residue. That was it. He assured me there was some fading and some brownish brush areas like I was describing, but said the main characters were all a rich black, which pretty well jived with what I was expecting.

 

He sent over a couple photos. One of the front and one of the back. They were inside shots with no lights on, so they were dark, and the piece was out of focus, but I was mostly looking at these to see how the edges of the board were cut, or not. Paul also had a habit of using these huge drawing boards and occasionally the work is only on a portion of the board, off centered, irregularly cut, etc. So I mostly wanted to see how big the art was on this board, and make sure when they listed the size (which is Paul's preferred art size), that I wasn't going to get a piece that was half that big, on a really big sheet of bristol. I looked at these on my phone (like a newb insufficiently_thoughtful_person) and I was happy to see the art was pretty much filling the board. In fact I was so happy to hear that my suspicions about possible tampering were unfounded, and that the sepia brushwork was in fact there, that I didn't do enough digging.

Did I mention I REALLY wanted this piece?

 

So, even against my own misgivings, I bit the bullet, paid roughly 3 times over market for the piece (like I said I REALLY wanted this thing), and had Steve ship it to me. He told me he thought I was really going to like it. It went out at the end of that week.

 

The day Steve shipped it to out to me, I was looking at the photos he sent me, not on a phone or tablet, but on my big Mac screen. I was trying to figure out how I wanted to frame the piece and arrived safely. I had saved the Heritage scan, which I thought looked overly hot/blown out/faded based on how Paul's faded sepia brushpen pieces looks on what I own already. I was already using the Heritage scan for mocking up some framing ideas. I was excited.

My plan was to reach out to Paul about possibly having him look at the piece, and maybe even work out something to have him touch up the faded bits. I even spoke to him one day, forwarded him the photo from Steve to ask about the history of the piece. The Coolines site says that it was for the French edition, but if it is, it's for a French edition I don't have. (I have copies of Escapo in French, Polish, Spanish, every hardcopy and softcover edition published in the States.) Paul said he thought it may have been a promo drawing, but he said he wanted a good scan of it if i could send him one when the piece came in. We also talked about the fading pen usage (he blamed Toth for advising him to use every tool he could) and other stuff.

Back to the framing mockups... On a lark, I opened up Steve's photos to color correct for the dark shadowy photo, and see how it looked in comparison in the same frame, since I thought the Heritage scan looked to yellow and washed out.

When I did the Photoshop correction, I immediately noticed some areas that looked hinky. Primarily the machine areas. Those should have been more faded than they appeared in my newly tweaked copy of Steve's dark photo of the piece. But again, the photo was dark and out of focus, so hard to really tell. But the one area that was sharp was that corner signature circle. It clearly looked like a bad trace job around the circle. I started noticing other areas that looked wacky.

 

I contacted Steve and told him about what I was seeing, sent photos of my corrected areas that looked problematic and expressed my misgivings about the piece's originality. Steve was very courteous throughout. His reply was that he asked his brother about it, and he indicated that Rich had just picked this piece up at NYCC, and they were just excited by how great it looked. They were not aware if any work might have been done to it between when Heritage had it and when Rich bought it. Just that when he packed it, he noted how much darker it was than other Pope pieces. But he also said if I got it and it was not right, they'd gladly do a refund. Than he was more interested in a repeat customer than a single sale.

2 days later, the piece arrived, and within 3 minutes of having it open, I knew it was allwrong. The linework compared to the Heritage scan was overinked, fat, didn't line up in many cases. More importantly someone tried to replicate brushpen work with a single thickness marker, so the tapers were "colored in", rather than a clean brush stroke. I was so mad, I wasn't thinking very straight. Paul's parts of the piece that were still intact were gorgeous!

I did take a couple pictures through the plastic it was wrapped in, but I didn't even want to handle it. I didn't want to leave anyone any room to try and claim it had been damaged or whatever and back out of the refund, or try and do a partial refund or whatever. I took 3 quick photos of a couple things. I repacked it within 10 minutes of it being there, and contacted Steve to give him the news.

He simply said to ship it back, which I did the following day when the PO opened.

The day it arrived there Steve let me know it arrived safe and sound, and that he'd issued the refund.
He was immensely friendly through the whole process. I expected more pushback or defensiveness. There was none.

So, I learned a lesson i thought I already knew. Always trust my gut and my brain, no matter what my heart tells me it wants.

Also, I am beyond pissed that the piece was thrashed. I'd been waiting to cool down a bit to write Felix about it, because I figured he would want to know. I'm glad someone hipped him to it faster than me. My only excuse for not saying anything sooner is the whole thing made me so crushed, I didn't want to invest the time to write all this down over it. As I'm writing this now, it really is sapping the joy out of me.

And I noted just the other day, despite my sending Steve the info about the piece, the Heritage scan and some of my own photos as proof of how much the piece was worked on, they have not changed the descriptor of the piece to mention that the work was done on it at all. It's not like they are unaware of it at this point. That also makes me sad and angry.

Steve, for his part, couldn't have been a nicer guy.
I can't prove that they were the ones that altered the art, clearly.
But I can say they know it was altered, because I told/showed them.

-e.

p.s. I so wanted that piece!!!!

p.p.s. I kept all correspondence from day one, for CYA purposes. I may have been an insufficiently_thoughtful_person, but not a complete total insufficiently_thoughtful_person.

 

 

 

 

Edited January 8, 2018 by ESeffinga

[PhilipB2k17]

19 hours ago, vodou said:

And yet, "benefit of the doubt". Or are you now (finally) past that?

Nice, always, but ruined forever. IMO.

Maybe everybody with fading marker Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Mike Zeck, John Byrne (among many others) should all invest $2 on a Sharpie and triple the value of their art? Because none of this really matters...right? Sheesh. Thanks for pointing this out Felix.

Even if the original artist re-inked it, it's still not "original" any longer. It's one thing to add an overlay, or MISSING parts of the art (such as the Title graphic, or word balloons). It's entirely something else to mess with the existing image. Felix's account of Jaimie Hernandez might be the exception, where he's doing touchups of otherwise minor issues.

And, I do want to bring up another issue that is only relevant to modern art. That is digital editing AFTER the original pen and ink drawing has been produced. Does anyone think that should be disclosed to the buyer before the sale? The original hand drawn piece may be altered digitally for various reasons. All perfectly legitimate from a comic book production standpoint. Maybe it's to fix a continuity error, or make room for a word balloon, etc. But, this means the published version differs from the OA version, even though the OA version has not been altered.

Back in the pre-digital era, these issues would have been fixed with a Stat, or be re-drawn, or with white out. But, the final image on the page would match the published version.

 

Edited January 8, 2018 by PhilipB2k17

[comix4fun]

1 hour ago, ESeffinga said:

I can add a first hand perspective to this Pope tale, as that was a piece I really really wanted when it came up on Heritage, but life happened and I missed the auction. So when the DBs posted the piece to their site I was gutted.

 

 

 

Eric, 

What was the gap in time between the Heritage auction and when you saw it for sale/tried to buy it from DBs?

 

[ESeffinga]

8 minutes ago, comix4fun said:

Eric, 

What was the gap in time between the Heritage auction and when you saw it for sale/tried to buy it from DBs?

 

About 2 & 1/2 months or so? So, it's entirely plausable someone could have done the work to it, and shifted it off onto Rich.

If I remember right, it popped up in my feed the day the Coolines site first posted it up. It wasn't long after NYCC. Just a couple weeks or so.

I blame ComicArtTracker!

[comix4fun]

1 minute ago, ESeffinga said:

About 2 & 1/2 months or so? So, it's entirely plausable someone could have done the work to it, and shifted it off onto Rich.

If I remember right, it popped up in my feed the day the Coolines site first posted it up. It wasn't long after NYCC. Just a couple weeks or so.

I blame ComicArtTracker!

Interesting, and they said it was "picked up at NYCC"....

That's only 1 month after the heritage hammer fell. Knock off a week for shipping time and whomever won it from Heritage only had it for 3-4 weeks and it went from faded to re-inked if it was, in fact, "picked up at NYCC" in it's current condition. 

[ESeffinga]

Pretty much.

[aokartman]

There was a mentality about "improving" the presentation of original comic art to make it more presentable and saleable.  It wasn't just adding trade dress, there was a fad of hand-coloring by the artist, and charging a premium.  This same concept also showed up within comic books with "restoration".  

The blowback has been pronounced within each community of collectors, and possibly the convergence of those collectors might be driving the trend toward purity of vintage state collectibles within the comics collecting community.

It's not as trendy as "condition", but I think it is hopeful for the future that comic collectors care about provenance.

David S. Albright

[comix4fun]

1 minute ago, aokartman said:

There was a mentality about "improving" the presentation of original comic art to make it more presentable and saleable.  It wasn't just adding trade dress, there was a fad of hand-coloring by the artist, and charging a premium.  This same concept also showed up within comic books with "restoration".  

The blowback has been pronounced within each community of collectors, and possibly the convergence of those collectors might be driving the trend toward purity of vintage state collectibles within the comics collecting community.

It's not as trendy as "condition", but I think it is hopeful for the future that comic collectors care about provenance.

David S. Albright

And it's incredibly important to Comic Art collectors, especially with the dollars that have entered the hobby in the last 20 years and the corresponding price/value increases. 

When you're paying 4-5-6 figures for a Kirby/Ditko/Byrne/Miller etc. piece. you don't want it to be "Kirby/Ditko/Byrne/Miller--and my cousin Kenny who's handy with a sharpie" piece. 

[NinjaSealed]

The poor DB's.....people keep on selling them touched up art, sketches as alternative covers and outright fakes. They have such bad luck when it comes to that stuff.

[PhilipB2k17]

23 minutes ago, aokartman said:

There was a mentality about "improving" the presentation of original comic art to make it more presentable and saleable.  It wasn't just adding trade dress, there was a fad of hand-coloring by the artist, and charging a premium.  This same concept also showed up within comic books with "restoration".  

The blowback has been pronounced within each community of collectors, and possibly the convergence of those collectors might be driving the trend toward purity of vintage state collectibles within the comics collecting community.

It's not as trendy as "condition", but I think it is hopeful for the future that comic collectors care about provenance.

David S. Albright

It's also important from an historical perspective, as this artform becomes more and more recognized as a classic American art. How the original art actually looked, and its production process, matters when you are examining the history of the publications. What materials and inks people used is relevant to understand their creative process. The fact that certain inks fade, is part of it.

[vodou]

21 hours ago, Nexus said:

I'm of two minds on this. I'm OK if the original inker goes over their original faded marker inks with something archival. This is a matter of preservation. However, I'd rather not have someone who had nothing to do with the original creation re-ink the piece. In either case, it should be disclosed.

I own an early Jaime Hernandez LOVE AND ROCKETS cover that was drawn in India ink, but had some spot blacks filled in with marker. It hadn't faded yet, but given the marker inks of that era, it was simply a matter of time. I consulted with Jaime's rep, Todd Hignite, to see what he thought. He agreed that in the best interests of the art, Jaime should go over the marker with India ink. He said he'd do the same. So he set it up with Jaime and now the cover not only looks great, but is saved for future generations.

(Jaime told me he originally used the marker to fill in some blacks because he was so broke at the time, he was trying to save on India ink! It was a lot of fun hanging out with him and talking about his art while he worked. Thanks Todd!)

As for Paul's art, he occasionally used a Pelikan marker in his early days. It was just another tool in his toolbox. Circa early 2000s, he stopped, after being advised by James Jean on archival inks. All the art I've sold for him has been drawn with these archival inks.

Yeah. To all of the above.

[vodou]

8 hours ago, PhilipB2k17 said:

Even if the original artist re-inked it, it's still not "original" any longer. It's one thing to add an overlay, or MISSING parts of the art (such as the Title graphic, or word balloons). It's entirely something else to mess with the existing image. Felix's account of Jaimie Hernandez might be the exception, where he's doing touchups of otherwise minor issues.

And, I do want to bring up another issue that is only relevant to modern art. That is digital editing AFTER the original pen and ink drawing has been produced. Does anyone think that should be disclosed to the buyer before the sale? The original hand drawn piece may be altered digitally for various reasons. All perfectly legitimate from a comic book production standpoint. Maybe it's to fix a continuity error, or make room for a word balloon, etc. But, this means the published version differs from the OA version, even though the OA version has not been altered.

Back in the pre-digital era, these issues would have been fixed with a Stat, or be re-drawn, or with white out. But, the final image on the page would match the published version.

 

Messing with the existing page - to me it's all about "intent". Are we trying to conserve/preserve or gin up the value when it's sell-time? Is the original artist still alive and willing or another professional post-croak, or is it some dude with $2 to buy a marker and no other skills to speak of?

I don't care what happens digitally. I'm interested in what's physical. It does not need to look like whatever was ultimately published. How big the gap is, and my personal interest in what's being offered physically would affect how much I'll pay though. (Maybe the digital tweaking made for an editorially 'better' image but not to my eye, thus I'd pay even more of the physical that differs!)

[aokartman]

So, here is a cover that has been bugging me because of what appears to be marker fade on, of all things, the bat emblem.  Ideas?

I appreciate the sentiment that I, personally, should not fool with it.

But, it would be so much greater with a deep black.

You can click through a couple times to get a magnification of the image.

Edit....I just restored a loose piece  of the title.  You can click through on that to see my work.....a little double tape to reattach the piece I found in the bottom of the mylar.  Scary stuff!        

Best, David

Edited January 9, 2018 by aokartman
detail and image