2012 saw me acquire my 100th page of Starman art. That is quite an obsession. I sold off a bunch of Tony Harris art this year as well as I reconsidered my collecting foci. I have made a few new mission statements in my comic art collection and one of these was to pass on most of the other Harris art and focus on Starman and Dr. Strange Flight of Bones. So I sold a few covers, all my Ex Machina pages (and I had quite a few there at one time), Liberty Files/Unholy 3 stuff (some of his best work I think) and kept saying yes when offered Starman pages. No FoB came my way this year as far as I recall. I already showed my Starman 3 cover in an earlier post; below are some of the Starman pages I was able to get this past year.
Gee, that page above is page 1 from issue 0. That would make it the first page of the comic ever published! SCORE!
I always enjoy the Tony Harris pages where he has a circle panel. He used to do it all the time. last year I got a few pages featuring The Shade that have the largest circle panel of Tony's I have ever seen. Look at that page above. I like the art deco elements around the circle panel, and the looseness of the last panel in the ink and in the lack of hard panel borders.
A great page from issue 1 featuring one of The Shade's shadow monsters. I am always glad to acquire pages like this that really form and establish the character in the reader's mind; right here we find out that the Shade is a badass and is not to be underestimated or trifled with.
A nice Jack page above, always welcome of course, and below it almost looks like a page from Ex Machina, eh?
Below is another nice character and content page from early in the run. Clarence O'Dare and the mayor discuss Jack Knight and how the city should approach a costumed vigilante.
These next two pages were a bit of a departure for me. I have been thinking of eliminating, or at least stop buying, non-Tony Harris pages from my Starman collection. But when I was considering a commission from Richard Pace I realized he had these 2 pages for sale on his CAF as well. So I got a cool Dr. Strange from Richard and these two/too cool pages featuring the Bodines, a great husband and wife villain team, and the Will Payton Starman.
Then, of course, I had to get this page from a bit later in the issue as well.
The big one though, other than the cover to issue 3 which is spectacular!, is the piece below. Tony Harris created two companion portraits, of Jack Knight/Starman and Richard Swift/The Shade. Mike White owns The Shade, but I was lucky enough to buy the Jack Knight one this year. These are two of the finest Starman related ink pieces Tony Harris ever created and I am proud to own this one.
 |
| Jack Knight Starman card art by creator Tony Harris |
No comments:
Post a Comment