Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow! I love to gush about my favorite artists here. Steve Rude is one of them. According to the email I just got, Rude is offering a huge bundle of absolutely gorgeous vintage Nexus pages-- including some from as far back as the Capital Comics days-- for sale from Heritage Auctions. You've been looking at a lot of my fumbling attempts at art, and I appreciate it. To reward your patience, here's a link to Rude's pages.
This both thrills and frustrates me. It's long been a dream of mine to have an original Steve Rude art page. Or a commission. My finances are a little complicated by a little thing we like to call the Pacific Ocean at the moment. It's too involved to explain and also... you know... personal. So this auction couldn't come at a more inconvenient time for my participation. Well, that's not true. It could have come back when I was flat broke and living from beer to beer. I'm just frustrated by my theoretical ability to pay versus the reality of the situation. But don't let that stop you. Buy some of those pages!
Actually, original art collecting interests me. I've encountered people who've owned prime Jack Kirby pages and traded them away. What would you trade a Jack Kirby page away for? The only thing I can think of that's worth it would be another Jack Kirby page. And some collectors own entire books. That's amazing. The most mind-boggling stories are the ones where the collector met the Kirbys in person and picked through all these pages and bought up a bundle of them for fifty bucks a pop. Can you imagine that? You couldn't buy one of Kirby's cigar ashes for fifty bucks these days!
Anyway, original art. It's expensive. It looks really cool, though. The printed books just do not do the actual artwork any kind of justice.
Oh, that's right-- I do own some original art. I own a couple of Alley Oop dailies. Just the pencils. They're on vellum and they are beautiful. My grandfather lived near the guy who was drawing Alley Oop at the time and told him I was a comic fan and that was the result. We've been meaning to have them framed for the longest time. I wish I hadn't been such an asshole kid or I would have written the artist a huge thank you letter. Instead I did nothing. I am so, so very sorry for that lapse now.
Yes, at one time I was a huge Alley Oop fan. I suppose I still am, but I haven't seen a strip in years.
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