One was the sale of Hergé's original cover to Tintin in America in a recent auction for 650,000 EU ( technically, I should write the amount as 650.000 EU. Europeans apparently use decimal points where we use commas, and vice versa). Along with the auction premium price, the total came to 780 000 EU. At the prevailing dollar-EU exchange rate, this makes it the first piece of comic art to cross the one million dollar mark.

There was a lot of discussion among the American collectors about whether any US comic art would ever make it to that level. Quite a few of them were of the opinion that if the cover to Action Comics #1 ( the issue that marked the debut of Superman, way back in 1937), or Amazing Fantasy# 15 ( the first appearance of Spider-man ) ever came into the open market, they could easily bring a million dollars, both being cornerstones of American historical memorabilia and twentieth century popular culture. Until the Tintin cover sold, the most expensive comic art pieces were John Romita Sr Spider-man covers, one of which made 100,000$ a few years ago, and Peanuts Sunday pages which are currently at an alarming high because Charles Schultz's estate is buying off almost every Schultz page that comes into the market. Of course, the comic art community is notorious for its secretive under-the-radar deals, so one can only hypothesise based on public information available through auction data.

My take on this, which I posted to a message board I frequent:

It's not hard to imagine why (this Tintin cover) would command so high a price. Just as an example:
1) If John Romita Sr drew only 23 Spider-man comics in his lifetime, including covers and interiors,

2) if ALL of the art were locked up by the artist's estate.

3) these were the only Spider-man comics to be published by Marvel

4) Romita Sr's Spider-man was the kind of comicbook that parents would recommend to their kids and grandchildren for decades, thereby making those 23 comics a part of generations of readers and fans, spanning all ages.

With all these in mind, isn't it natural that prices would skyrocket beyond belief if a single cover came out into the market?

There are only this number( 23) of Tintin covers, after all, and add to it the fact that they are Essential Comics, known and loved for 70+ years, and with translations in over fifty languages, one can hardly be bemused at the kind of hysteria an original Tintin cover would elicit from collectors.

You cannot extend this logic to other highly influential American creators - Kirby, Charles Schultz ( whose work I think is slowly approaching that level, because of the scarcity in the market introduced by the mass-buyout), and even Frank Frazetta because their volume of work is huge compared to Herge's. It cannot even be extended to historic items like the cover of Superman #1, well, yes, that's a historic cover, but there are other options for the discerning Superman collector - a landmark Curt Swan cover, or a Murphy Anderson splash, or even a Byrne cover. In case of Tintin, these 23 covers are ALL that there is, this might very well be the only chance a collector has, in his lifetime, to pick up an original Tintin cover, drawn by the only artist associated with the character. I know I would go all the way if I had the money. :-)

And the baseline is - the words 'Tintin' and 'Herge' elicit much more response in the non-comic-book reading masses ( outside the US, that is) than 'Romita' or 'Schultz' would - even though Spider-man and Peanuts are equally well-known and loved characters as the boy reporter.

Yesterday, there was the news that an anonymous collector had donated all 24 pages of Amazing Fantasy 15 to the Library of Congress, putting paid to all rumours of whether the art would ever surface and how much its value would be. The collector apparently refused to submit the pages for an official valuation( he doesn't even get a tax benefit this way, and probably he does not even need it! ), and before the donation, even contacted the artist Steve Ditko to find out if he wanted them back. Ditko, a reclusive creator who refuses to be photographed, interviewed or bothered in any way whatsoever by fans, has a history of subjecting his own artwork to mutilation and it's probably to everybody's benefit that he did not claim any rights to the pages. It's official - the first appearance of Spider-man now belongs to the American people. Half the collectors are now swooning over the fact that they can actually SEE the pages for themselves, the rest just crossed off the item from their wish-list.

This is particularly significant because nobody really knows where most of the art from that period is, and how much of it actually exists. Comic art was seen as disposable items once the print negatives were created, and were thrown in the trash, shredded or given away. It wasn't until the seventies that artists like Neal Adams started the trend of the publisher having to return the art to the original artists. And once the comic art collectors' market took off in earnest, there was a lot of art stolen from Marvel's warehouses. To this day, the majority of Jack Kirby's pages remain locked up in private collections, the owners fearing lawsuits and finger-pointing if they display the art to the world.

I just made an important Art Deal. The offer was to buy two key panel pages from a brilliant series, featuring the first appearances of the primary protagonists. The seller and I had been negotiating the terms since the beginning of the week. I had initially enquired about two other pages, but these two had attracted me when I saw them a couple of months ago so I went ahead and asked him if there was any chance he would lower prices. He came down to an amount that was about midway between what I had quoted and what the initial offer price was. On top of that, he would give me the two other pages I wanted, the ones that led to this enquiry in the first place, for free. He gave me until Wednesday to decide.

I made the Art Deal. I refused the offer and ultimately agreed to buy just the two cheaper pages.

This, I think, taught me two important lesson. One, to not overcommit myself, out of blind lust for something that has just come out into the market. This was a problem that had plagued me all of last year. 2007 was a good, no, an AMAZING art year for me, but it also meant that all of last year, I was committing my money to pages that caught my fancy without giving myself a clear set of Collecting Goals. I promised myself that this year would be different, that my money would go into clearing just ONE time payment and that's that. There was one weak moment, the cover to Hitman #50 - it came on eBay last month and made me sweat until the last minute. I bid an amount that I was pretty sure was the fair market price for that cover, but it went for a 100$ more. Which only means that my Hitman covers right now are worth about triple of what I paid for them - not a bad thing. I knew my limit, I made my call, and I was breathing easy after the auction ended - which is a darned good feeling, let me tell you.

And that's one thing I would like to tell aspiring comic art collectors who look at this post - hahahaha, I nearly crapped myself while writing this last line - patience is a virue ( the missing 't' in 'virtue' is an art collectors' in-joke, if you get it, consider yourself part of the club. ) Pieces come out on dealers' sites and CAF members sites with alarming regularity, and it requires a herculean amount of self-restraint to know which piece is the right one for you and which can be passed over. Yes, every piece of comic art is unique, and most likely when they are sold, they will stay locked in some collector's portfolio for a very, very long time. But while an art piece can be unique, a first appearance can be unique, an artist's ouevre, thankfully, is not confined to a single good piece or a single pathbreaking series. Which is to say, unless said artist is dead, there will always be more artwork being produced, hopefully better than the one you briefly lusted after and were beaten to. Live with the defeat, and keep your eyes open for the next good piece that comes your way. Fire-sales are not uncommon in the field, when a collector needs some quick money and is willing to offload part of his prized pieces. And one of those prized pieces could be the one that got away the last time.

The second thing I learnt is the importance of discussion. All throughout the last two days, I talked about this deal with my friends, the ones who have some amount of opinion about my art collecting - opinions other than derision and skepticism, that is. I heard a great deal of different opinions, a fair amount of them encouraging, and all of them lucid, tangible arguments that helped me come to my own decision. To all those who helped me out, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am glad I have you guys to fall back upon in times of need.

A few more words about why 2007 was such a good art year. If you have been following my various art update posts, you would have seen quite a lot of new pages that I got.

Some more that I haven't talked about, at least on this blog:

John Totleben - Vermillion page. What is Vermillion? A mind-bending scifi story written by Lucius Shepherd, published by the Helix imprint of DC comics. Helix was extremely short-lived, with its only successful offering ( in terms of length ) being Warren Ellis's epic Transmetropolitan, which moved to Vertigo once the former folded. I never really got into Vermillion, but the high point of the series was the two issues drawn by John Totleben who, if you will remember, is one of my favourite artists. The page I bought is, in my opinion, a mindblowing piece of work. Look at the design of the lower panel - but you will be able to do that if you can tear your eyes away from the central figure, a face inked with such loving detail that the face seems three-dimensional.

Another John Totleben page, a Tarzan cover prelim. Normally the idea of a preliminary work is to provide the artist with some idea of how the final piece should look like. Most prelim pages you will see are sparsely pencilled works, with stick figures and quick strokes that vaguely allude to the finesse of the final page. But this is Totleben we are talking about, and his concept of a prelim is a detailed inked piece that is a scaled-down version of the final painted piece, that you can see here. Compare the two. I like to think that the painting is a lightboxed version of the ink piece, which makes my cover prelim the original original art. *grin*

A double-page spread from Shade the Changing Man, by Chris Bachalo. I don't think this eminently frameable piece needs words to accompany it.

Another 100 Bullets page by Eduardo Risso. Muhwahahahaha.

A Dan Brereton page from The Black Terror, his earliest work. When I received this page in the mail and opened it the first time, I got a little weak-kneed and had to sit down for a bit. Brereton's watercolors are beautiful - much, much more detailed on the actual page than you would ever see in a scan.

And, the Highpoint of the Year, and currently the glory of my small collection - an original watercolor painting of Daigoro from Lone Wolf and Cub by Goseki Kojima, the co-creator of LW&C. I attribute this acquisition to just one thing - Plain Dumb Luck. When at Super-con, I was hanging around the comicbook and toy stalls, occasionally asking about Studio Ghibli figurines to sellers who had some amount of anime-related merchandise on display. One of the sellers said he didn't have them right now, but I could get in touch with him later, and gave me his card. The name on it looked familiar, and I realised it was a comic collector, one I had bid against for the Transmetropolitan piece in my collection, and he had also left a comment on the page in my gallery. Introductions and an enthusiastic conversation followed, and after we looked through each other's portfolios, he pointed out that I would probably like to meet another CAF member who had tastes similar to mine. And that's how I met Felix.

Felix's portfolio had one great piece after another. A full-page splash from The Boys, a James Jean print, a a couple of Supreme Power pages, and then, finally, two Kojima pieces.

I collapsed.

Some quick negotiations ( "Please please sell this to me." "Ok." "How much?" "<high four-figure amount>" "Excellent, I will pay." ) and I owned the page, at least in spirit. It took another six months to complete the time payment and yay, I had something that I had only dreamt about. Believe me, getting a Kojima piece at this stage of my collecting career is like a major threshhold - I can actually feel pride in my collection right now, and think I am going about art collecting the right way. As Felix himself says, it's near-impossible to get manga artists' works. He travelled to Japan multiple times looking for Kojima pages, and finally hit the paydirt through a friend. He found a couple of pieces done on plain paper, and a couple done on 14" by 16" art boards. Mine is one of the latter. You can check out Felix's piece on his own gallery, it's a much better work than mine but that does not mean I am any less proud of the one I have.

Another page I bought from Felix was a Supreme Power page, a splendid face-off page pencilled by Gary Frank and inked by Jon Sibal.

There were other pieces that came in last year, but I am holding them close to my chest. For a number of reasons.

I uploaded some new art into my gallery.

An unpublished cover design for Powers vol 2 #1. Powers, if you don't know already, is a police procedural set in a world populated with superheroes. Written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated in a beautiful cartoony style by Michael Avon Oeming, this series attained cult status while being published by Image comics, and then went on to be published by Marvel. Bendis's Snap-crackle-pop dialogues have never been utilised better - this is where his ear for streetspeak, honed by the indie Goldfish and Jinx, has attained a balance with his super-hero writing. There are numerous detractors to Bendis who might think otherwise, but the man has oodles of talent. And what can I say about Oeming's artwork? He's from the less-is-more school, relying on a minimalist style to bring out every aspect of superhero glitz and cop grittiness. Highly recommended!

A Cameron Stewart/Guy Davis Catwoman page. For most of the nineties, the character of Catwoman was a confused criminal who would apparently be anybody - right from a CIA agent to a dominatrix to a cat burglar, and all of this while sporting an impossible, exploitative cheesecake look. It took a writer named Ed Brubaker to take the character back to basics. Along with artist Darwyn Cooke, Catwoman was relaunched with a new costume and a coherent motivation. While Cooke left, a number of artists like Cameron Stewart, Scott Morse and Brad Rader took over - all of them excellent storytellers and bearing unique cartoony styles that in no way focussed on making the character bootylicious just to add to fanboy appeal. Of these, I have a special affection for Cameron Stewart's style. His inks on Guy Davis's layouts have an inherent simplicity to them, and yet there is this unique level of dynamism to the sequences that leaps out of the pages.

An Akira colour page. This is an airbrushed page from Akira, the seminal manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, painted by Steve Oliff on xeroxes of Otomo's art. The Epic reprints of Akira in the eighties had some of the most vibrant colour schemes ever seen in American comics at that time. ( Lynn Varley's colours on Ronin might be the only ones that could match up to them). I bought this from Steve personally at Super-con 2007. I was one of the first to reach his table, and nearly crapped my pants seeing the stack of Akira pages by him. I must have pored through about 30-odd pages before I saw this one, and immediately took it out. Because I was tremendously short of money, this was the only one I got, and Steve, while autographing it, said "that's one of my favourites." I thought he was saying that just for the heck of it. The next day, I was hanging around near his table again, and there was a bigger crowd near him. Steve saw me, and told the people around him, "That guy got a good one." Then he said he wanted to see the piece once again for the last time. *grin* I hung around with Steve for some more time, and he talked to me about Tony Salmons art, apparently he was a big fan of Salmons and was looking around for the Marvel Fanfare that had the only DD story that Tony did. I plan to buy some more Akira art from Steve the next time around.

An X-men page by Alan Davis and Paul Neary that features one of the earliest appearances of the character X-23 into the Marvel universe, and a page from Another Nail, an Elseworlds story by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer. I love the first page because of the beautifully designed page - Alan Davis is a genius, in case you didn't know, and some of my earliest memories of reading Batman is associated with Davis's art from Batman and the Outsiders and Detective Comics. You will notice that the panel design on the X-men page kind of resonates with the chaotic image of broken glass from the first panel. Simply amazing! The page from Another Nail is special because it has Davis drawing almost all of the JLA ( except for Batman and Green Arrow). Note the panel where Phantom Stranger is fading away - when i saw the scans on the site where I got it from, I thought the inker had used stipple to come up with that effect. ( Stipple being the art term wherein the artist uses dots to introduce depth and shade into a piece ) To my surprise, it turned out to be a different method altogether - some of the nice little techniques one picks up from watching a virtuoso inker's work first-hand.

And oh, these pages were the ones that got me a new friend, so they are even more special!

Uploaded three new pages of art this month.

Two pieces by Leinil Francis Yu. One from X-Men 103, which features the cutest head-shot of Rogue I've ever seen. And another from New X-Men annual 2001, written by Grant Morrison, with the entire issue drawn in widescreen, horizontal format ( so you have to read the comic by turning it on its side. ) This page is special because it has the scene that's the genesis of Cyclops and Emma Frost's relationship, with Emma turning up in Cyclops's room at night with a champagne bottle in hand. And of course, she looks awesomely hawt!

The third piece is a Punisher splash page from the acclaimed Garth Ennis run. The story arc this page is from is called "Up is Down and Black is White", where one of the Punisher's enemies who got away this one time comes up with this brilliant idea of digging up the Punisher's family's remains from their graves, pissing on them on camera and sending the video to all major news channels. Needless to say, Frank Castle goes on a rampage. This page, for me, is a perfect Punisher page. Dark, brooding and beautiful...

I put up a couple of new pages on my Comic Art Fans gallery. Stuff that I bought or picked up in the USA following time payments.

A Dark Victory page by Tim Sale. It's in fact one of the last pages in the series - just before the final sequence. One of the best images of Two-face I have ever seen. If you think Tim Sale is a brilliant artist, you should hold a piece of his original art at close quarters and look at the details to appreciate HOW good he really is.

A Trinity page by Matt Wagner. The page has Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and some of the coolest Matt Wagner inking you will ever see. I am a MW junkie, having discovered the guy's work in the Demon miniseries published by DC in the 1980s. His recent work includes the Dark Moon Rising miniseries starring Batman, which are modern reimaginings of Batman's earliest adventures. Batman and the Monster Men is the first Hugo Strange story, Batman and the Mad Monk tells the story of the vampirish Mad Monk, one of the earliest Bob Kane stories.

An Usagi Yojimbo pin-up by Stan Sakai. I don't really know if this is a published pin-up, but Sakai tends to use these kind of inked drawings as back cover images or inside the comics as bonus pinup material. Someday I need to get my paws on an Usagi Yojimbo cover.

A Loveless page by Marcelo Frusin. Marcelo Frusin is another artist from Argentina who makes perfect use of black and white in his work, much like Risso, his fellow countryman ( I believe he trained under Risso for some time). Loveless is an ongoing Western comicbook series written by Brian Azzarrello, and this page is from one of the earliest issues. It's also special because it's inked, most of Frusin's available art is pencils only.

A New X-Men page by Frank Quitely. Yes, I promised myself I will get more and more Frank Quitely art, and that's exactly what I am doing. This is one of my favourite pages from Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men.

Another Frank Quitely work, a sketch of Death. What can I say? I love the guy's work.

A Starman page by Tony Harris. Starman, frankly speaking, is one of the most respectful DC series you will ever read. It brings a rich sense of history to a character whose shelf-life has been very choppy in the DC Universe, with multiple people taking on the mantle of Starman, with different powers and origins. James Robinson, Tony Harris and all the others who chipped in as the 80 issue series progressed revisited the history of Starman and brought a cohesiveness to it that blows all such reimaginings out of the water. This page also features the Golden Age Sandman, Wesley Dodds, from one of the best storylines in the series, called Sand and Stars.

Well, like 'em?

Comics artists interpreting literary figures and characters.

via Chris Weston's blog. Weston has drawn the latest contribution to the site, Winston Smith and Big Brother from Orwell's 1984, and Weston has this to say about his work -

"I 'm particularily pleased with my depiction of Big Brother, which is a rare case of something turning out exactly as I saw it in my head. He'sa mash-up of propaganda images of Hitler, Stalin and Lord Kitchener."

Personal favourites:

Eduardo Risso's Sandokan.

David Mack's Miyamoto Musashi.

Mike Mignola's Jacob Marley.

Ben Templesmith's Hunter S Thompson.

Bruce Timm's HP Lovecraft

Dave McKean's Salman Rushdie.

Tony DeZuniga's Sherlock Holmes.

Jock's Carlos Castaneda.

What a great idea for commissions!

In the meantime, feel free to go check out the Comic Rockstars Toilet Seat Museum. The brain-child of Brian Wood and proprietor of the Comic book Lounge Isotope, James Sime, the collection boggles the mind. It also makes me want to go shoot myself for not checking it out when I was in the Bay Area earlier this year.

I nearly screwed up my journey home. I had assumed that my flight was in the night, just like my colleague's was, a couple of weeks ago. The plan was to come to office on Monday morning and bid farewell to my colleagues. Happened to glance at the time on my tickets on Sunday night, and gah - the flight was at 2:15 in the day. Take into account the fact I would have to be present at the airport 3 hours before the check-in time ( I had excess baggage - yes, haha, I know ) and that Monday morning was peak traffic time on the freeway, getting to the office was out of the question. Took several deep breaths to calm self down. Man, if I hadn't double-checked, I would have been stranded. Phew.

Check-in went by completely bereft of incident, major or minor. The person behind the counter didn't even blink when I hefted the three pieces of baggage onto the scale - not even at the fact that all of them were on the higher side of the 32-kilo limit. I took out two of the heavier bits of my handbaggage, the mammoth Ode To Kirohito and the two volume Finder/Keeper collection before putting it onto the weighing machine, it came to 7.98 kgs. The limit was 7. The guy waved me in. Whew!

Again, fairly uneventful flight, marked by the successful reading and rereading of Ode To Kirohito, a 788 page medical manga that blows the previous Tezuka works I've read ( Buddha and Astro Boy ) out of the water. From what I had been hearing about it, this is more of gekiga than Tezuka's all-ages stuff, marked by a lot of adult content and Christian symbolism. Turned out to be just that. What I had assumed was the way the book would end turned out to be addressed by Tezuka in the first 200 pages. It then proceeds in a direction that - goddamnit, I don't want to ruin this for any of you, but rest assured it ends on a note halfway between upbeat and bittersweet.

Oh, and also read Finder and Keeper, Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak novels, which The Flatmate got at the grand price of a dollar at a clearance sale. Effing excellent!

Born Under A Lucky Star Department: The Asian Art Museum in San Franciso was the exclusive US venue for an Osamu Tezuka retrospective exhibit. It started on June 2 and I went there on June 9th. Pictures were not allowed inside the exhibit, so instead I hung around the exhibit for about 5 hours. Amazing, amazing experience. Sample black and white pages from all of Tezuka's major series, Phoenix, Melmo, Buddha, Blackjack, Kirohito, Astro Boy ( obviously! ), Apollo, Metropolis, Vampire, Crime and Punishment, Princess Knight. Coloured endpapers and chapter frontispieces from some of them, and gigantic facsimile pages ( which I didn't particularly enjoy). The best part about the exhibit was the way it gave an insight into Tezuka's growth as an artist - the creative use of the splash pages in works like Melmo, the detailed crosshatching in his later works, the increasingly adult-oriented stories he did as he progressed from being the pioneer of Japanese comics to The God of Manga. I also spent an agonizing half an hour in the museum store drooling over Tezuka prints. A day well spent.

I leave the US of A on Monday night.

In the last one and a half months, I have -

• been part of a team that's delivered a feature-complete product a day ahead of deadline.


• seen my first Monet, Titian, Manet, El Greco and Gainsborough. And these were names I remembered off the top of my head.


• visited my first comicbook shops.


• bought out full runs of comics and manga and exceeded my weight limit by 20 kilos.


• been to my first Comic book convention. Woo Hoo!


• indulged in Major Comic art acquisitions, 32 in all.


• managed to buy Perfect Gifts.


• visited 5-level used record/CD/DVD outlets, each of which made me want to sit in a corner and whimper to myself.


• held original first printings of the first three Dark Tower books in my hands, caressed them for about twenty minutes, put them back gently in their display cases and cried on the way out.


• eaten The Crappiest Biryani Evah, and priced at 8.99$ to boot.



• had surprise packages mailed to me from Spain.
  
  
• become part-time Web Elf for the coolest Electronic Dance Music site ever.
  
  
• not had the time to write about all these. Mostly because of point (1), but that will soon be remedied.

F**K YEAH!

And the comic shop owner quoted too much on that Hitman cover. Higher than my initial estimate. Goddamnit. I will try to bargain him down, but...erm....I don't think it's happening. Sucks.

But I picked up a complete run of Michael Zulli's Puma Blues ( 23 issues) and a complete run on Ted McKeever's Metropol ( 2 volumes, 15 issues), both for a cumulative price of 20$. And two old Heavy Metal issues for 2$ each. Cheaper than in Best Book Stall, and in better condition at that.

I have earmarked quite a bunch of stuff for the upcoming sale. Most likely I will be cleaning up their stock of complete runs. There are sets of Sam and Twitch, The Human Target ( the Vertigo series by Peter Milligan), a complete run of Longshot, and all the issues look like they are signed by Art Adams ( I am greedy, so I didn't buy that off immediately because they were 15$ for 6 issues, but 50% discount next week - yum! ). Quite a bit of other stuff too, I don't remember for sure. And seems like there's more full runs coming in.

So I am in Palo Alto, California right now.

Right opposite my hotel, there is an Indian Chaat place, where you get thaalis and panipuris. I am not interested in either. ( "Panipuris? You are not interested in panipuris??" "Well, not when they are $3.95 for six pieces. It's un-Indian that way.") But. But. There's a comicbook store right next to that eatery. Unfortunately for me, the time it closes is much before the time I get back from work, except on weekends.

Luckily enough, yesterday I came back from work just about half an hour before closing time.

And went inside My Very First Comic Book Store.

It was a cool experience. The salesman really knew his stuff, and pointed out the stacks of Asterix and Tintin they had right next to the door, because of the Indian population who inquired about them frequently. Because I did not have too much time, I decided to ask him about the art collection they had advertised outside, and he came back with two huge folders. Yum. Got to looking at the pages. Saw some nice Buscema/Severin Weirdworld pages, a couple of excellent Thor splashes, a Son of Satan splash by Ed Hannigan and Sonny Trinidad that set my heart a-flutter, especially when I saw the low price marked onto the pages. ( The salesman explained that those were the prices the owner had paid for them when he bought the pages himself. Damn.) And then, just at the end of the second folder, I saw...

A Hitman cover.

There was a Hitman cover for sale at the store.

Ok, let me set this straight. There are 60 John McCrea Hitman covers in existence right now, 61 if you count issue 10 Million. I own one of them, I have reserved three more, there's one on sale right now on Comic Art fans, Romitaman.com has the cover to #34 marked at an exorbitant price because it won an Eisner award, and I have accounted for about six or seven more of the covers.

That leaves us with about 40. And I just found one opposite my hotel room.

I would probably preen a little, but let me figure out how much the owner quotes. Fingers crossed.

And did I tell you about the sale that begins May 20th, which involves a 50% discount on all back issues and 25% on statues?

One of the major art pieces that went on eBay sometime back was a page by Neal Adams that features the first appearance of Ra's Al Ghul. Quite possibly, The Neal Adams Batman page. The price was stuck at 10000$ for about a week, and at the last minute, finished at 27000$. I am surprised. Everybody is, actually. The page doesn't even feature Batman per se, and Neal Adams Batman covers go for less than the final price. And it's tax season, forchrissakes.

Dave McKean's cover to Sandman 18, Dream of a Thousand Cats is up on eBay right now. One of the last McKean Sandman covers that the man still had, and it's going to go for quite a sum, I can assure you. At 17000$ right now. The work is a combination of acrylic, ink, and a collage of wood, framing, resin crow skull ( used to be an original crow skull which fell apart), transfer type, cardboard and gold acrylic paint.

I finished all my Paul Grist books last week. What. An. Experience. Just when I thought the likes of Bendis, Azzarello, Chaykin and Miller had done whatever could be done for crime fiction in graphic literature, Grist has gone and set a new standard with his Kane books. Set in the fictional city of New Eden, the series follows the eponymous hero, Detective Kane and his cohorts at the local Precinct. The story starts with Kane being reissued his badge following an unfortunate incident involving his ex-partner. The thing with Grist's work is - in the space of a couple of pages, he switches timelines, plotlines and characters, and with a flair that leaves the unwitting reader gasping for breath. Equally stunning is Jack Staff, one of his superhero works which, like most of the modern-day classic comics - by which I mean comics that go beyond the monthly schedule and try to use the superhero cliches in ways that mess with your mind - pays tribute to familiar characters. And introduces its own.( Betsy Braddock, vampire reporter has a ring to it, don't you think? ) An amazing mixture of twists, humour and good storytelling.

As it turns out, there are two Jack Staff books and two Kane books that I don't have yet. Soon be remedied, nyahahahahah.

...that I put up a couple of new pieces on my Comic Art Fans gallery?


A Steve Rude/Gary Martin Moth page, from issue 2.

An Eduardo Risso 100 Bullets page, from issue 25.

A Mark Bagley Ultimate Spider-man page, featuring the second appearance of Ultimate Green Goblin.

Questions asked by davenchit.

1. Why collect?
Because I want to pay my kids' school fees and still, you know, be able to live a normal life.

Think about it. The number of children to the number of schools available is a ratio that is bafflingly high right now. ( I should know, I have played Caesar 3 too long ). Schools ask for donations to admit kids, and increase school fees by about 20% every year. By the time my kids start going to school, I should be able to respond to their demand for the month's school fees this way.

"Dad, school fees."

"Hold on, my eBay auction for the Eric Powell Goon pages and the Essential Spider-man series get over in half an hour, and I will pass on the buyer's payment to your Paypal account. You will have to mail off the stuff tomorrow, though...."

"Whatever!"

I get back to my hologaming console, and my kid goes out to score some weed. Everybody's happy.

Belated April Fool's Day.

Actually, collecting for me is the reason why I am earning money. I can see where my money goes. I get a reason every morning to wake up and not think of how I have to spend the next ten hours cooped up in a cubicle. It's the adrenaline rush that comes with possessing something that is not easily accessible. It gives me good memories, ones that can pile up on unhappy ones and make everything seem all right again. It makes a life more complicated than it actually is, when I agonize over the hard choices I have to make everytime I see a Matt Wagner Demon page and a Gene Ha Starman page selling for the same price and wonder which one I should buy.

And yes, it means I am cooler than everyone else out there. Hoo-ah!

2. Deathmatch: High Culture vs. Popular Culture. Who wins and why?
The term "Deathmatch" you've used in the question refers to a word that was brought into everyday usage by Doom, a video game and pro wrestling. Does that answer your question? ;-)

But seriously, I find the terms too blurred to come to a conclusion. My inherent bias says that Popular Culture would gobble up High Culture in a trice, and that HC would not even evolve without dissolving an older iteration of itself into PC, and morphing itself into something that's more H than P. Go figure!


3. How does Augustus du Ponti compare with the monkeys you have known? Is he an ideal, grown out of bitter disappointment in the monkeys you've met in real life?
I do not know too many monkeys in real life, alas. I am trying to get to know Augustus better, and so far the only thing he has made abundantly clear is that I shouldn't grin at him, bared teeth makes him feel threatened.

4. 5 pieces of art you would buy if money and access were not constraints.
Ah. There are just too many, my friend! Ok, here goes. Terms and conditions: I won't talk about the obviously historical pieces like the origin page of Batman or the first issue of Action comics, because nobody knows if the art to those actually exist or not.

- The interiors to a complete Frank Miller Sin City comic. Sin City: To Hell and Back issue 7, to be precise. Why? Because Miller never sells any of his art, and getting a complete Sin City comic would be a feat worthy of Collectorial Hosannahs for many millenia. Because this is the ONLY Sin City comic that is in colour, the honours done by Miller's wife and partner, Lynn Varley. Because this issue is a drug-riddled trip in which the title character hallucinates fictional characters around him - which ensures guest stars like Elektra, Lone Wolf and Cub, Wonder Woman, the characters from 300, basically characters from every Miller comic.

- A Charles Addams' cartoon. My absolutely favouritest black humourist ever.

- The cover to Amazing Spider-man # 122, the issue after the one in which Spider-man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy died. It's by John Romita Sr, the definitive Spidey artist and calling the storyline iconic would be an understatement.

- A Dave McKean cover to one of the Sandman books. Preferably this one.

- A huge-ass painting. Not an Alex Ross, I am not that crazy about Ross nowadays. This painting by Steve Rude gives me this kick in my intestines every time I see it due to its Norman Rockwellishness ( I would love to own a Rockwell, but that's not really comic art. I don't even want to think of illustration art at this point of time in my life...) Maybe a Barry Windsor-Smith fantasy painting, or a Boris Vallejo one. *sigh*

5. I suppose this has to be asked. What was your first graphic novel and how did you like it?
Truth be told, I don't remember. Depends on what you qualify as a graphic novel, I think. The first comicbook I remember reading was Amar Chitra Katha's Krishna. The first superhero comic was a Batman issue from the eighties which I tracked down later - turned out it was a one-shot drawn by Gene Colan. All the superhero comics I read as a kid were stray issues from this series and that, but I guess if I were to think of the first self-contained story that made sense to me as being part of something that was bigger than other comics I've read would be Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing, which I have talked about sometime back. At about the same time, i read stray issues of Miller's Daredevil, Giffen's Ambush Bug and Romero's Axa, all of which were very different from the "normal" comics I had read so far. Do they count?

Junji Ito is messing with my head.

Junji Ito who? A horror creator from Japan. Known primarily for a series called Uzumaki (Spiral in English, also made into a not-so-good movie) and for Tomie. Tomie. I read scans of this series a couple of years back. Fairly gruesome story about a drop-dead beautiful girl (heh heh heh) named Tomie, who has the power to make people obsess over her, and ultimately, kill her.

Except, Tomie does not stay dead easily. She regenerates, inspite of having been hacked and slashed and dismembered and, in one mega-sicko sequence, being ground to a paste and mixed with Sake. She regenerates, and sometimes, most of the time, actually, she comes back in ways that are extremely distressing to an unsuspecting manga fan who is having his dinner. Take my word for it.

The scans I had read before were from this defunct company called Comicsone, and the translations weren't too good. Dark Horse comics has taken to reprinting all of Junji Ito's works in a series called Museum of Horror, and I recently bought volume 2. Excellent stuff, more so because in this volume Ito's art seems much more polished than the early Tomie stories. Now to find volumes 1 and 3.

You can read a complete Junji Ito horror story right here.

* * *

Gaurav got a bunch of my stuff back from the States. A Sergio Aragones Groo pin-up, a Harry Roland Vampirella painting, a Tony Harris Starman page, and a 2-page Kevin Maguire splash page from Gen-13/Fantastic Four( my first double-page splash! Woo Hoo!). The splash page had some of the most detailed inking I have ever seen, I spent a good half an hour just looking at the intricacies. Apart from the artwork, he got back the complete Hellboy collection, the first three volumes of Lady Snowblood, quite a bit of Ellis - all of which were part of Brady's collection that I had purchased this year, most of which is still at 2fargon's place in the States. I finished the Hellboy volumes sometimes yesterday - started them in the airport the day before. Yes, I was travelling.

* * *

How was the last year for me? Very trippy. Right from Jan 1st, 2006, half of which I spent in Bangalore airport, I seem to have been travelling like mad. I cannot remember more than one or two weekends in the first three months of this year when I was in Hyderabad. None of these trips were too restful, except for a Mumbai trip in April, where I spent three and a half days in invigorating company, and the last week of the year, which was my Back To Basics trip. I nearly ended up spending half of 31st December in an airport too, but I didn't mind it one bit, nosirreebob.

In case you haven't been following the LJ too obviously, last year was also the year of Original Art. ( 2004 was the year of The Comic Book, 2005 the year of The DVD ) Technically, I bought my first pieces on 25th December 2005, but in 2006, the acquisition of my first Quitely page broke the 200$-eBay-barrier. I slacked off sometime in the middle of the year, but then I had this life-altering conversation with a friend, sometime in September, about why he is going to collect original comicbook art, and only original art, after he graduates. There was a flash of light, in which I realised how right he was. And from then, there was no looking back.

It was also, in a slighter degree, the year of a near-complete comicbook collection. I bought out a collection from someone in the US, and effectively that has put an end to fervent searches and snipes on eBay. I am contented. For now.

A depressing year, as far as new music goes. Apart from the fact that my sister gifted me an iPod shuffle, there has not been any hallelujah-worthy moment in music for me, this year. (Yes, that's right, I have become a jaded old fucker. Rape me, my friends. Which reminds me that I waded through Nirvana's discography sometime back. Excellent rush of happy memories that was. ) No, hold on, let me remember some music-worthy moments from last year...

- The live Zero-7 video that Vasu showed me, that made me go and listen to all of Zero-7 for a couple of days.
- Listening to this band from Nepal called Nepathya, who do rock versions of traditional songs from around the Himalayas. Infectious!
- Rediscovering DJ Krush, who I had heard a little bit of in 2005.
- Siddharth singing 'Appudo Ippudo' from Bommarilu, Shreya Ghoshal on the songs of Anukakonda Oka Roju, and, most important of all, 'Dole Dole' from Pokiri.
- All the adgy mixes.
- Kailash Kher's Kailasa, the live DVD as well as the CD.

Hmm, seems like there might be a mixtape in the offing after all...

The first half of the year, I took this rather drastic measure of choosing to ignore ALL blockbuster movies that are released. It was meant to be a one-year abstinence from all things corporate-Hollywood-and-Bollywood-ish, but the idea got chucked somewhere along the way. I did not watch too many movies either ways - probably the fact that Sympathy For Lady Vengeance did not impress me as much early this year has something to do with it. The ones I saw were reruns of the ones I saw before. Repeat viewings rock, don't they?

About the rest of what went on in my life, well, all of you who know me already know about what's going on, so do I really need to write it all down? The rest of you will have to make do, I guess.

* * *

Right now, I have in front of me the following - Pride of Baghdad and Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, both hardcover. Genshiken volume 3 - I had bought volumes 4 and 5 yesterday on the last day of the Odyssey sale. DVDs of Pitamaghan, Vettaiyadu Vilaiyadu, Anjali, and Jillanu Oru Kaadhal. A neat Hitman page, drawn by John McCrea and inked by Gary Leach, featuring the last appearance of Sixpack, that I picked up from the post office today morning. Ramesh Menon's Mahabharata is occupying my nightly hours.

Ain't life grand?

I am obsessed with comicartfans.com. As if you didn't know. While collection-hopping sometime last week, I landed up on a Spanish collector's gallery, where, to my surprise, I found an Alan Davis page for sale. Not just another Alan Davis page, it was a page from an issue of Batman and the Outsiders, published sometime in 1985. It happened to be the issue where I had seen Alan Davis's work for the very first time. And also, it was cheap, remarkably so. So, in my nostalgia-induced headiness, I sent a message to the collector saying that I wanted the page, and would he be all right with mailing it to India, and all that jazz.

He replied in a couple of hours, and quoted a price that was extremely reasonable, shipping included. Everything fine and hunky-dory. I would pay him on Monday, I told him. Cool.

So on Monday, just before I am about to pay, I notice that he's online in GTalk. Just engage in casual conversation for a while, talking about comic conventions and collecting addictions and how tough it is to pay for Uderzo pages. While we are talking, I tell him that I am ready to pay and go over to Paypal, type in my information and click on "send money". Just then, he asks me, "have you checked out the site that represents Alan Davis and sells his art for him?" "No", I said. I hadn't come across any site that sold Alan Davis artwork. He passed on a URL to me, and the moment I clicked on it, I knew I should have been more careful. There were Alan Davis pages GALORE, and truth be told, much better than the ones this guy had put up. It even had a page from The Nail, with all the JLA characters in it, and some pages from the X-23 debut in X-Men, including a kick-ass fight scene between X-23 and Wolverine.

And this guy, he takes my Paypal payment and returns it to me. I don't know if he got charged for it or not, but this is what he said after returning the money:

"Maybe this way I lost a sale but won a friend. :D"

You sure did, Pablo.

Isn't it obvious why?

Excellente!

I bought a page from this eBay seller two months ago. A page from The Moth, this wild indie comic created by Steve Rude and Gary Martin, with Martin, Rude's primary inker on Nexus, providing the dialogues as well on this series.

When I was about to pay the seller, I noticed the address he had added on his invoice, in case I wanted to send him a money order. As it turned out, it was Gary Martin himself, selling his page. Mailed him and talked about how cool his work was, and asked him if he had other pages for sale. Turns out he had, and agreed to sell them to me at cheap ( and I mean REALLY cheap prices). We agreed on a time-payment scheme and I ended up buying 5 pages off him. A month later, the payment was complete, and Gary sent the pages off, promising to inform me whenever he put up his Nexus pages for sale. The pages from the older series are all gone, but there is a new storyline coming out in Summer 2007, and I get first crack at them, yay!

And today I got the pages in the mail, and I found that Gary has also sent a volume of his book on comic book inking free with the package. Inside is inscribed "To my #1 fan in India, thanks for all the support", followed by his signature. How cool is that? I just can't stop grinning!!

I have uploaded all but one of pages to my comicartfans gallery, and you can check them out right here.