Tag Archives: comic art

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Update

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?

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Right here, right now.

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.

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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?

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Does not really deserve a title.

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?

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