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A tale of two $8500 art pages.
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41 posts in this topic

One is a Steve Ditko Silver Age Giant Man/Wasp panel page from Tales to Astonish... 

The other is a Batman Page by Greg Capullo from the Court of Owls run. Admittedly, I like the Batman page a lot more than the TTOS page. But...they are currently both being offered for $8500. (Never mind where).

Which would you rather have? I’m sure this will ignite quite a debate between moder OA and classic OA collectors. (EDIT: Removed "at that price" to spark a debate, because "neither" would otherwise be a perfectly legitimate answer. LOL!)

7D34CA3E-FC79-48BE-BE2F-C8EC5095C6DA.jpeg

1B5120C0-FEA0-4A58-B5EE-93CB25AB0F5A.jpeg

Edited by PhilipB2k17
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4 minutes ago, comix4fun said:

Honestly? 

Neither. 

Which is why neither of them are going to sell at $8500. But, if you had to choose one or the other (and they were priced exactly the same) which would you choose?

Edited by PhilipB2k17
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but, the Batman page.    I don't like either one.   I certainly don't like either one at that price point.    But the batman is easier to look at, at least.

Edited by Bronty
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6 minutes ago, rsonenthal said:

I think Mark Evanier wrote about this issue.  Ditko started it, but it’s Joe Orlando mostly.  

Other way around. Apparently, Orlando penciled it and Stan called in Ditko to do extensive revisions because he didn't like the result.

https://www.comics.org/issue/18761/#141160

Edited by PhilipB2k17
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Just now, PhilipB2k17 said:

Other way around. Apparently, Orlando penciled it and Stan called in Ditko to do extensive revisions because he didn't like the result.

https://www.comics.org/issue/132094/

I think that means it's Orlando but for the Ditko revisions, whatever those are. 

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Just now, comix4fun said:

I think that means it's Orlando but for the Ditko revisions, whatever those are. 

http://marvelsilverage.blogspot.com/2016/07/astonish-fall-of-giant-man.html

 

FWIW.

"The following issue, Tales to Astonish 61 (Nov 1964), saw Ditko step up to pencil the Giant-Man tale as well as the Hulk story. On the opening page of "Now Walks the Android", Stan explains that the new artist scheduled to take over Giant-Man from Ayers was unable to, so Steve Ditko stepped in to "quickly pencil Stan's -script while George Bell inked it seconds before deadline." What Stan doesn't tell you is that the story had actually been started by Joe Orlando, who had quit when Stan had asked him to make some changes Orlando didn't agree with. Stan then had lined up Rockwell - nephew of famed American illustrator Norman Rockwell - to take on the regular pencils on Giant-Man and even went so far as to introduce the new artist on the letters pages that hyped the issue.
Rockwell had been an assistant to Milton Caniff on the hugely successful newspaper strip Steve Canyon, and had worked for Stan during the 1950s on several Atlas titles, so wouldn't have been unfamiliar with comic strips and deadlines. But for reasons that aren't clear, Rockwell backed out of the assignment at the last moment, and Stan had to turn to Marvel mainstay Steve Ditko. Even so, it's spectacularly honest of Stan to admit in print that it was a rush job born out of a production crisis, something that I venture no DC Comics editor would ever do. For a rush job, the result is pretty good. Ditko handles superhero action better than Ayers, so it was always going to be an improvement for me.

Stan's -script brings back Egghead, not an especially effective villain, but Ditko's android is pretty creepy. Given the way the interior art for this issue was produced, and that Marvel covers were usually drawn after the interior art, it's interesting that Jack Kirby's cover art doesn't depict the face of the Android - probably because he didn't know what it looked like when he pencilled the cover art - he very likely had to draw it before Ditko turned in his eleventh hour art job."

 

Mike Burkey is (or was) selling the title splash to this story for $45K (and attributes it to Ditko).

http://www.romitaman.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=20389&ArtistId=1033

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Update:

Here's Mark Evanier's e-mail(s) as reprinted from Fred Hembeck:

"So Stan gave that Giant-Man assignment to another artist to pencil. This other artist pencilled it and then Stan didn't like the way he'd plotted the story. He demanded that much of it be redrawn, not because the art was bad but because he [Stan] wanted different actions in the panels. The other artist said he wouldn't do this without more pay. Stan said he couldn't pay him more. The other artist quit and never worked for Marvel again.

So Stan turned to Ditko, who DIDN'T draw 10 or 12 pages over the weekend. He REdrew about a third of the story, leaving or altering panels by the other guy. Look at the story again. There are plenty of panels there that Ditko had nothing to do with. Ditko never laid out pages that way in his entire career.

Roussos probably did ink the story in a few days...but that was almost the norm for Roussos. He was very fast. "

HembecK:

Luckily, I hadn't yet filed away my copy of Tales To Astonish #61, so I hastily grabbed it, opened it up, and tried my best to see it with new eyes, still trying to come to terms with this bit of blockbuster information I'd just been fed. All these years, I'd associated this story with the mystery of Rockwell, and now it turns out, there was even more intrigue surrounding "Now Walks the Android" than I was originally led to believe! It was like a real-life version of one of those "everything-you-know-is-wrong" big reveals on a cleverer-than-thou TV series, only it was happening to some pages credited for decades in my mind to Steve Ditko, my all-time favorite cartoonist! And now I learn it wasn't Ditko at all, at least not completely. So, I poured over those pages, and &#Array; with a metaphorical light bulb suddenly blinking on over my head &#Array; saw panels that featured faces that, now that you mention it, didn't look all that Ditkoesque, especially several featuring Hank Pym's gal pal, the Wasp. And Mark was right on the, um, mark about those layouts: they looked like nothing I'd ever seen from Ditko in any of the years prior or in all the decades since. In my mind, I'd always unconsciously chalked up this atypical approach to the nature of the rush Stan had burdened Sturdy Steve with, but really, does it make ANY sense to change your whole style because you're in a hurry? Nope.

Take this page, for instance. The faces certainly evince the Ditko touch, but not that layout... [panel omitted. Not ours, BTW]

Later quoting Evanier:

Orlando told me that his problem was that, working Marvel method, he'd draw the story out based on whatever Stan gave him. Then after it was all pencilled, Stan would start rethinking the story or coming up with new twists and saying, "Oh, you have to redo this page so that it goes like this..." Ditko and Kirby didn't have this problem too often...although it was an occasional sore point with them when it did happen. But Orlando didn't develop the stories the way Stan wanted them developed, and it was a cause of friction. (I suspect part of the problem was also that Stan wasn't sure what to do with Daredevil in those early issues.)

http://www.ign.com/articles/2005/05/04/the-fred-hembeck-show-episode-8?page=3

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48 minutes ago, Bronty said:

I can't believe I'm saying this, but, the Batman page.    I don't like either one.   I certainly don't like either one at that price point.    But the batman is easier to look at, at least.

Put me in the "can't believe I am saying this" camp, but as big a Ditko fan as I am I would take the Capullo page if they were priced similarly. Better images, better subject matter. I'm always going to choose the stronger page of art, and the Capullo page is a superior example. I wouldn't pay $8500 for either of them though.

Edited by mysterio
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Does Capullo draw in blue pencil? 

Or is that a blue line that Glapion inked? 

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