Just another miscellaneous Monday.
Speaking with a longtime customer of ours yesterday, one who is an avid collector of original comic book art and also a big Stephen King fan, I discovered that he purchased some pieces from Dark Tower: The Gunslinger #1. He owns the two-page spread featuring young Roland and his friends, and he owns the piece used for the 1:75 variant cover (and presumably used for the interior page showing the same scene). WOW. No, I didn’t ask him how much they cost…but I imagine they didn’t go cheap.
That reminded me of another customer who, in the ’60s, sent a letter of comment to Green Lantern, and, because he was either chosen randomly or he had the best letter that month (I forget), he was given the complete original art for one chapter (five or six pages or so) of a then-recent Flash/Green Lantern team-up. Ah, the days when they just gave this stuff away. This was classic Gil Kane stuff, too…”good letter, kid, here you go.”
When I last spoke to him about it, he said he had people still tracking him down through that long-ago letter (as he still lived in the same general area), offering to buy that art from him. And yes, the pieces remain in his possession.
I don’t own a lot of original art myself…as a result of doing this site, a couple cartoonists I’ve long admired have given me pieces of art, which was incredibly nice of them: Fred Hembeck gave me the drawing you can see here, and Scott Saavedra gave me this piece, which is no longer on his site, so I’ll just have put it right here:
I also have a page from some anonymous ’80s Archie comic that had been given to me, featuring nice shots of Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, Ethyl, and Ms. Grundy, as well as a pencil drawing of Captain Jack I bought from Mike Kazaleh. And I guess there’s those drawings of Groo ‘n’ company in those issues of Groo the Wanderer that Sergio Aragones would include with his signature. And somewhere around here I have a small Hellboy sketch on a signature card that a friend got for me at the San Diego Con.
But that’s pretty much it. I’d entertained the idea of trying to buy a Curt Swan Superman page…you know, one of the approximately one kazillion he drew during the ’80s, not any classic Silver Age stuff or any of the work he did with Murphy Anderson during the ’70s. But even that stuff, common as you’d think it was, is getting up there (though this page didn’t go for too much, considering it features Supes, Lois and Jimmy).
The holy grail for me, though, is getting one of Curt Swan’s pages from this issue of Swamp Thing. Curt Swan drawing Swamp Thing…it’s as if God came down to Earth and published a comic book. Plus, it features Mark Millar’s greatest, nuttiest script for the series, even though, as he says here, “I have a horrible feeling that it killed Curt Swan.”
In other news:
Well, okay, this isn’t news, but pal Dorian and I had this conversation at the store Saturday, while I was processing some comic supplies:
Me: “Hey, Dor, what was the color code we were using for regular-sized backing boards?”
Dor: “I HAVEN’T WORKED HERE IN A YEAR AND A HALF.”
Er, yeah, I guess there’s that. (But damned if he didn’t eventually rattle off all the color codes we use for the supplies, which I can’t remember for the life of me.)
Okay, here’s some actual news (“actual” and “news” used loosely):
Carl Barks smack-down given to Australian treasurer.
Zack Snyder reveals precious few details about the forthcoming Watchmen movie.
“Comic books are often associated with spotty little boys curled up in their bedrooms wishing they had a girlfriend” is how this story begins, detailing an exhibit of Spanish comics.
And now…a motivational speech from unshaven Batman:
