As Irene and I walked south down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue Saturday, I happened to look to the left at just the right moment to spot the Hulk looking back—because this print by artist Doug Bloodworth was hanging in a gallery window.

Here’s a clearer version of the piece, with the image not obscured by the glare of the street lights.

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Since I’m always bitching to you when I see fine art interpretations of comics go for big bucks while images by the artists who toiled in the field go for peanuts—as when I complained that a pop artist’s version of Green Lantern sold for 7,723 times more than one by the man who created the character—I owe it to you to share that for once, the comics field won.

You may have heard that a page of Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott artwork from Fantastic Four #55, one starring the Silver Surfer, was sold earlier this month by Heritage Auctions for $155,350.

But what you might not know (and what I only just remembered) is that Sharon Moody, a fine artist about whom I’ve written at length before, is either offering for sale or has already sold her own interpretation of that same page. (more…)

Steve Thompson, aware of my strong feelings about the paintings of Sharon Moody, alerted me to the comics-inspired art of Vin Vicini. Funny thing is, in spite of what could be seen as superficial similarities, the new images I saw didn’t bother me at all. So let’s take a look at a couple of Vicini’s paintings, and then I’ll explain why.

First, a 12″ x 12″ oil painting titled “Chapter 7: ‘Catch the Hero.'”

This first example includes details from the covers of Amazing Spider-Man #19 (December 1964), Batman #219 (February 1970), and Avengers #35 (December 1966), all of which I’ve rotated so you can more easily compare them to how they were used above.

Here’s one more, “Batman and the Crate,” an 11″ x 14″ oil painting. (more…)

I was feeling slightly glum last night about some of the things I wrote about Sharon Moody over the past few weeks, because even though I did write that “I’m not saying Moody isn’t a skillful artist, or that she’s bad person” and reported that her paintings are “a spot-on recreation of the original, showing a high degree of craft,” my bottom line, that I was unmoved by her part in the power of the supposedly transformative paintings, had to be a difficult message to hear.

Not that I felt at all guilty about it, you understand, because I said what I thought and still think needed to be said.

But none of us who puts work out in the public arena likes our work to be unloved, unadmired, and (from our point of view) misunderstood, and I don’t like making anyone feel the way I know I would feel had those words been written about me.

Then I came across Philip Hensher’s devastating (and entertaining) review this morning in The Guardian of James Thackara’s novel The Book of Kings, and all I could do was laugh. (more…)

I headed to Manhattan Saturday for a visit to the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery so I could see for myself those Sharon Moody paintings which had so ticked me off three weeks ago. Would experiencing the real-world art hung on a gallery wall, as opposed to seeing them diminished into relatively small .jpgs, change the way I felt? Would attempting to see the artwork with the guidance of gallery director Frank Bernarducci lessen my irritation about what I saw as an obvious attribution issue?

I believed both the art and the artist deserved a shot at changing my mind, so it was worth a trip before the exhibition closed, which it will do on the 15th. So if you want to see it yourself, you’d better hurry.

[And since I don’t want to recap everything I’ve said before, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, and want to catch up, check out this, this, this, this, this, and this, in that order.]

But first, before diving into the visit itself … a tangent.

One reason I’m sensitive to this issue is because the artists whose work has been repurposed here are more than just names to me. Sure, some of them I may know from their work only (albeit work that affected me deeply and helped transform my life), but there were others who were far more than that to me. I worked alongside many of these creators during my days on staff at Marvel Comics (and yes, that’s what I looked like below, seen with my then-future wife in photos from the 1975 Marvel Comics Convention program book) and later as a freelancer for both Marvel and DC.

So I think of these people as friends and colleagues. And when I see an image by Jack Kirby or Ross Andru or José Luis García-López (the last of whom actually drew one of my own stories) or any other comics creator used without even a tip of the hat, I take it personally.

Ironically, even the gallery visit itself was personal. Because 37 West 57th Street happens to be only a block and a half away from 575 Madison Avenue, where I spent so many years working for Marvel during the ’70s. Whenever I’m in that part of midtown Manhattan, I usually pause in front of the building to remember of how my life was changed there. So you can see how wading through the geography of comics past to speak up on behalf of comics past might have gotten me a little verklempt.

But enough misty-eyed nostalgia … (more…)

As I head to New York to see in person the Sharon Moody art exhibition I’ve been going on about ever since this post—I’m hanging out at the Baltimore Amtrak station right now—I realize I’ve never shared the ad that started it all.

So here it is!

I’m looking forward to seeing the paintings in their natural habitat … and to trying to see it all through the eyes of the exhibition curator. Should make for a very interesting day!

Tune in tommorrow to learn exactly how interesting!

I’ll be heading into Manhattan tomorrow to visit the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery and, I hope, reach some sort of closure as far as those Sharon Moody paintings are concerned. But while in town for the day, a guy’s got to eat, right? And if this guy’s got to eat in Manhattan, it’s going to be at Shopsins as often as possible.

I’ve told you before how much I love the place—because of rather than spite of all those one-star Yelp reviews that say things such as: “Incredibly rude. Incredibly ignorant. Incredibly sexist. Incredibly disgusting. Being called a c***sucker multiple times and told to ‘go f*** myself’ while I’m photographing on assignment for a very well regarded city food magazine at the cheese shop next door by a foul-mouthed old man and his idiot son is not my idea of a hip Lower East Side foodie experience.”

Hey, they’ve never given me any trouble.

Anyway … I was checking out the insane menu in preparation for tomorrow’s brunch, and saw the following image on their eclectic homepage:

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2011 is over and done with, so I thought I’d look back and see which of my posts were read the most last year.

One thing that’s clear is you’re all as interested in the issues raised by those Sharon Moody paintings of comics books as I am—my initial commentary on the matter was my most-clicked post of the year (almost virally so), and 3 of the top 10 posts were directly related to the case. (Which means you’ll want to check back in a week after I see the paintings in person Saturday.)

Here are the stories you read the most:

1. A few words in defense of Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema, Irv Novick, and other anonymized artists

2. Optometrist says blonde drivers “much more dangerous” than brunettes

3. Win $200 by making my zombie play into a mini-movie

4. Brian Bolland’s brilliantly blistering rebuttal

5. A few further thoughts on the artwork of Sharon Moody

6. It’s not too late to attend last weekend’s Nebula Awards

7. Can you identify this romance comic?

8. My favorite photo from San Diego Comic-Con: Pat and Dick Lupoff

9. Can you recognize this face?

10. Wall Street architect literally occupies Wall Street in 1931

Several readers who’ve been following my posts on the paintings of Sharon Moody have pointed me toward a recent New York Times article titled “Apropos Appropriation” by Randy Kennedy. Kennedy, reporting on a lawsuit that arose over appropriation by artist Richard Prince, wrote:

In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince—whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others—broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. …

The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used—or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. …

Over the last couple of decades part of the equation for deciding whether fair use is indeed fair is how much the thing copied has been transformed. In other words, even if we are long past making anything completely new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes declared a couple of millenniums ago, copying should be allowed only to the degree to which it adds to or builds on what came before.

What those who sent me the article from which I plucked the excerpt above want to know (and please do go read the whole thing) is whether I believed Moody’s actions bore any similarities to what Prince had done. And my initial thought on reading the article was that—even though I found it a fascinating piece—I didn’t really care. (more…)

Some who’ve read my recent posts “A few words in defense of Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema, Irv Novick, and other anonymized artists“, “A few further thoughts on the artwork of Sharon Moody,” “Brian Bolland’s brilliantly blistering rebuttal,” and “Why a comic book isn’t a Hershey’s bar” seem to have gotten the erroneous impression that I’ve have a thing against mashups, smashups, allusions, sampling, remixing, tributes, homages, or whatever word you’d prefer to use for the act of performing alchemy on existing works to make something new.

Hey, I’ve got no problem with any of those acts—I’ve committed many of them myself. But I do believe one should always act honestly, openly, and with full disclosure, especially when one is borrowing from another artist who could be considered il miglior fabbro.

I actually love that kind of comics-related art when done appropriately. Here are some examples that intrigue or entertain me rather than offend.

You should make a habit of visiting the Covered blog, where contemporary artists reinterpret classic (and some not so classic) comics covers.

Check out Brodie H. Brockie’s take on Flash #175.

One thing to note is that beneath these images, in addition to crediting Brockie, Covered also stated, “Original cover by Carmine Infantino and Mike Esposito; DC 1967.” The correct and classy thing to do. (more…)