La Zona Muerta

Strap in; this is gonna be a long one.

So, I’m a big comic book dork. Over the months and years before I get too bored to update this blog, that will become apparent, believe me. One of my latest comic book obsessions is original art.

What does that mean in the context of comics? Original art means the pages comic book artists prepare that get photographed or scanned and turned into comic books. It’s literally the pages that the artists create and work on.

Sometimes, on YouTube, I’ll watch the guys that really collect original comic book art, I mean REALLY collect it. The guys that have dozens, hundreds of pages and show them off. The big names in collecting are generally in a community, people swapping ridiculously expensive pages you will never see on the open market. “I’ll trade you three John Byrnes for a Jack Kirby!” and the like. I can’t say I’m jealous, exactly, but I’ll certainly cop to envy. To me, it’s really neat to hold pages that my favorite artists touched, that they labored on. Original art is essentially a product of production, a (then, not so much now) necessary evil, but it’s also a result of craft.

Original art is generally pretty expensive. Now, expensive to you might be different to what expensive to me is, but suffice to say that, with rare exceptions, pages with famous characters or drawn by famous artists generally cost hundreds of dollars, and key stuff costs thousands. REALLY important stuff (covers, moments from famous comics) costs tens, even HUNDREDS of thousands. Now, non superhero, non adventure art by lesser known artists won’t set you back as much… but the original art game is overall not a cheap one to enter.

So, of course, here I come blundering in. I’m not rich; I’m solidly lower middle class, so to me, spending a few hundred dollars on original art is a pretty big ask, and sometimes a pretty big decision to toss and turn over.

My original art tally so far is two pages from stick figure artist Matt Feazell (he may still sell orginal art at his website; I bought a couple of pages from one of his Zot! backups along with a bunch of comics from him. Very nice guy) and two pages from the mighty Evan Dorkin (also a nice guy who went out of his way to ship me his pages in a different manner than he explictly advertises using at my request. He also included a personal message to my wife and I and a l’il Spidey drawing). My Dorkin pages are framed and hung; my Feazell pages aren’t because of their awkward size and the idea I have to show them off (I want to hang them with the actual printed pages from the comic).

The Feazell pages, although nice and from one of my favorite comics ever (Zot!) don’t really have the personal significances to me that the Dorkin pages do; the Dorkin pages come from DORK!, a Dorkin anthology that housed the Eltingville Club, and one strip that hit more close to home than I care to admit, the Northwest Comix Collective, a bunch of douchebag misanthropes from Seattle talking shit about comics and barfing out their own awful comix and zines.

Cough. There but for the grace of God go I.

(please ignore the terrible Dutch angle here; I am a large man and there was not a good way to frame this photo in my tiny hallway)

Anyway, that strip is easily one of my most beloved comics ever, so I had to have them when Dorkin put them up for sale… and there ended my original art odyssey.

Until Mark Bright passed away.

Now, Bright is probably not a huge name to most, certainly not a household name. To ME he was a big deal, having created the literal most iconic piece of Transformers comic book art ever (and ACTUALLY iconic; not the way the term is used today with no meaning) and then drawing Iron Man for nearly three years RIGHT when I started reading comics for real (and then following it up with a run on various incarnations of Green Lantern, which was also foundational to me).

Bright did lots of pick up work here and there; I believe his longest sustained work in comics was probably for Milestone Comics on the terrific ICON; a Superman analogue with a twist; an alien baby crash landing into the southern portion of the United States in the 1800s, but being Black. That was a great series (especially as it becomes clear that ICON is not exactly what you think he is and the book isn’t really about him, anyway, at least not fully. Also… how else are young, white kids finding out about W.E.B. DuBois? Bless that book), but Milestone was a victim of both corporate weirdness from the company they partnered with, DC Comics, and the fact that the North American comic book industry very nearly died in the late 90s, hemorrhaging four colored blood everywhere.

Bright’s next move was probably his last real big one… he helped his longtime partner (and one of my favorite writers) Christopher Priest create the wonderful Quantum and Woody; the world’s most dysfunctional superhero team. Q&W is a buddy cop movie on paper with wacky powers, pseudoscience and genuine pathos. The book was hilarious, forged in the fires of Seinfeld and Justice League International amongst other things, and of course, since I liked it, it was cancelled after a year and a half. It did manage to come back once or twice but again, the company that published it, Acclaim Comics (there’s a topic for another day) let the book down.

When Bright passed, I immediately hit the Web, looking for some art I could practice my own sloppy brand of tribute on (meaning applying digital “inks” to one of his compositions, which I did here https://www.deviantart.com/djconvoy/art/I-Am-Iron-Man-1037713044), and I found an original art broker site (See? I got there in the end) with a BUNCH of his Quantum and Woody pages for cheap.

hadtogetithadtogetithadtogetit

I ended up narrowing down to one page from the final issue of the first run; Quantum and Woody have been shorn of their powers and their reasons for maintaining their partnership. In a few pages, Woody is going to tell both Quantum and us, the readers, that the book has been cancelled.

Perfect. In the cart it went.

Oh a whim, I plugged in “Transformers” to see if there was anything worth looking at. I was on a budget, both monetarily and time-wise because I was doing this at work (please don’t be a narc).

Lo and behold, it only happened that they had a page from my favorite Transformers artist of all time, Geoff Senior.

Senior just happens to have been most prolific in terms of pages drawn on Transformers… he’s a gun for hire, a professional, he did what he was asked. I doubt he has any particular love or affinity for the franchise except that it brings in work for him once in awhile, but man, did he produce some great art for Transformers, over many different iterations of it.

The art site didn’t even know who this was or what the comic was that the page was from; I of course, being a dork, instantly knew it was from a Transformers convention exclusive comic featuring Beast Wars Megatron.

Perfect. In the cart it went.

Is this the beginning of my personal art collecting renaissance? Am I gonna be one of those dudes on YouTube with their giant portfolios of original art?

Nah. I promised the missus that I’d only buy stuff, IF I continue to buy original art, that means something to me. It’s going to have to be perfect Venn diagram overlaps of timing and money and availability and sentiment.

Don’t tell her that I have an eye on an expensive piece for her birthday; she’d kill me if she saw the price tag.