March 31 2007 Roosting Chickens

Hi Jeff... thanks for the message-by-proxy from DVS in the comment section. Just so it's all here in the blog itself, I'll post it, too:

(after some initial discussion about the details of the divorce settlement when it comes to original art pages...)

J: Who gets what pages (a tangible and valuable asset, not necessarily just to be relegated to the estate); how do you determine the value and share, page by page (arguably, Ger did more than 40% of the work on many pages and you certainly did more than 60% on others)?

D: We couldn't. The range of prices on the few pages we auctioned on eBay to test the waters last year means the pages are worth what you can get for them on a given day and depends largely on how much more than two people with deep pockets want them. Ger and I agreed years ago in the event of a split that we would divide the pages 50-50 on a strict "one for you, one for me" basis starting with the earliest page in issue 65 when he started on the book. The randomness of doing it that way would mean it was luck of the draw as to who got what pages. I'd get 1900 and Ger would get 1900. The accountant originally wanted to do a valuation of the pages as a company asset, but that really isn't the way things work in the comic-book field. You get your artwork back. We kept the pages in the company because we were both in the company. If we got paid for a page the revenue got divided 60-40 whether it went towards a company expense or whether it was part of our salaries. It was a convenient way to make sure we shared in our rare art sales. But the understanding was always that Ger was entitled to a fair share of the pages (and it isn't just about the amount of work that went into it – a page with my characters on it: particularly Cerebus or Jaka with backgrounds just at the periphery sells for a lot more than an all background page). What we are tentatively doing now is giving each of us jurisdiction over half of the pages. I can authorize the sale of pages over which I have jurisdiction and Ger can authorize the sale of pages over which he has jurisdiction. Neither of us is particularly interested in selling artwork since the artwork is the thing that has appreciated the most in dollar value over the years. The trade paperbacks still sell for what the trade paperbacks sell for, the house is worth substantially less than what we paid for it at the top of the housing market and the intellectual property rights to Cerebus for movies or merchandising aren't for sale so that point is pretty well moot.

Lengthy digression: Ger considers the Cerebus art market to be dead right now, but I don't agree. I think the artwork is just under-valued. Brian Coppola for several years there was able to buy virtually every page that came on the market for between $500 and $700. Lately, the few pages that have been offered for sale or auction haven't been meeting their reserve and have been withdrawn more often than they've changed hands. But, come on – there are roughly 2,200 pages out there circulating or theoretically circulating. I don't think there's any other art team that has 2,200 pages in circulation. If the Cerebus art market was dead hundreds of those pages would be dumped onto eBay at $200 to $400 a page. The owners would be desperate to sell them for whatever they could get. No, I think it's a case of people believing the pages will go up in value from their present level so they're hanging onto them. If someone starts paying $1,000 to $1,200 a page the way Brian was one of the first to make the jump to $500 to $700 a page, I think they'll be able to pick up the stray pages that come onto the market and probably persuade some owners to part with pages they've been sitting on. I mean, Harry Kremer would barely speak to me when I put the pages up to $100. To him that was a ridiculous amount of money and he wouldn't pay it and he resented it as one of my biggest art buyers to that point. But Ger and I were just as happy not to sell the pages and if we did sell them we wanted to make $100 off of them. At that point if you had offered us $100 a page for the whole lot we would have sold them in a New York minute and carried them over to your house one at a time. Then they started evaporating at $100 a page and we put the brakes on and just let the market set its own price without our participation. People used to anguish and virtually dissolve in front of us at conventions really, really, wanting to buy a page but…a HUNDRED BUCKS! Brian's Cerebus the Artvark [sic] website was set up by him to update everyone on what Cerebus pages were trading hands at and, as far as I know, for as long as he's had it up and running you can pretty much count the number of pages he's documented on two hands and have several fingers left over. That isn't a dead market, that's an undervalued market.

My take on it:

This ought to start some interesting conversations over at Bloggin'Male.

I don't see it.

Today (3:00 PM EDT; 31 March 2007) there are 34 pieces of comic-related original art on eBay, out of 2036 items, with prices of $1000 or above. That is, with price tags of $1000 or above. Of these 34, 8 of them are being bid on; most are "buy it now" listings. Of these 8, 3 of them are b/w comic art: a Frank Miller Daredevil page; a John Byrne (20"x30") commission, so that probably does not count as a comic page; and a Hitch & Neary Authority piece (also an uber-sized splash piece). Most, but not all, of rest of the high-priced spread are paintings and color pieces of various sorts.

Without a real sense of who buys and why, my reading of Dave's note is that of all pages as commodities with a revolving door in and out of the market because they can be leveraged by someone who knows someone who wants to buy a thing who... the old domino game when it comes to the way lots of art exchanges hands. When the market price has gone up, then the speculators absolutely do come out and try to sell/sell/sell.

On the other hand, when you are tagging artificial value to things with no intrinsic worth, you have to rely on iconic status, not just age, not just being of a time, etc. I just picked up, for the fun of it, six pages of a Patsy Walker comic by Al Hartley and Stan Lee - they are some really cool examples from this genre, and oversized and lovely from 1963, for $19 a page.

It is not altogether clear to me how Dave thinks that 2200 pages (or so) out there in circulation helps him out. It probably means that the actual collectors are saturated, and (substantially) the speculators are left. And the collectors became keenly aware that there were 4800 (or so) pages in the vault that could be brought out.

Each of them, then, has roughly the same number of pages (1900) as there are in circulation (substract my ca 120 pages, and you are really in that ballpark).

Let's do a thought experiment:

Ger decides to make hay while the sun shines. Let's say that there are 1000 of the 1900 that are really cool pages, and he sticks a $500 price tag on each one. Fire sale. He'll take the $500,000 and run, and pick up $100K on the remaining 900 pages.

Could a person sell 1900 Cerebus pages? Or 1000?

Nope.

Dave and Ger put eight (8!) "Cerebus and Jaka pages" up for sale, and the prices came down. And even at that, only two people bought all 8 of them (hi Jim).

There are (as of today) 933 people registered at the yahoo site. Would everyone there buy one page each for $500?

OK. So Ger sets up a web site and leaves them there to sell at $500. How long until the last one is sold? 5 years... 10 years...
ever?

And what else that anyone is holding on to would ever sell?

There are 2200 pages out there, from over a 30 year period, and the vast majority (as Dave indirectly points out) were sold at less than the current market value (that is, very few have actually been traded at the current market value). The only way the market value goes up is ... increased iconic status of "Cerebus the Aardvark" which, it seems to me, comes with continued presence in as close to the mainstream as you can get. What fraction of the new fan base (new buyers of the phone books) are going to come after the original art?

That, or a big old fire at the vault.

Three people have approached me, directly, in the last few months, looking to sell... and asking for over market value. To date, none of them has gone ahead and put the pages up on eBay to see what price they might actually get.

Holding on to a page or ten costs effectively nothing, so I would not expect to see a market dump as Dave speculates. But we have nearly complete inactivity.

On 63 total hits for "Cerebus" on eBay at all, and some of these are for misspellings of Cerberus. And of the 63 items, 12 have bids (and of the 12, 2 of them have more than 1 bid). Nothing in the "Buy it now" store.

Let's see... "Patsy Walker" has 14 hits, 4 with bids, and 2 over 1 bid; 96 items in the eBay "Buy it now" store.

Near as I can tell... there are 10 or so auctions that involve Matt Wagner's "Mage" and about 200 copies of mainly the collected issues in the "Buy it now" store.

OK, not fair (but admittedly the Patsy Walker comparison is funny). How about something we can track that is more like legacy collecting: "Tales of Suspense." Nearly all of the 294 hits are for the Silver Age comics. Of the 294, 126 have bids, and 59 of them have over 2 bids. If Captain America and Iron Man were not still being published, do you think that there would be this sort of action on copies of "Tales of Suspense"?

Your answer will determine whether you agree with Dave's analysis or mine.

Nothing like a little data to kill a beautiful hypothesis.

You want to increase the market value for Cerebus pages? Then put out a Dave Sim & Gerhard 25-issue maxi-series called "The Tales of Young Cerebus" and attract 5000 new fans.

Oh, wait... not gonna happen.

March 29 2007 Another no deal...

Him: "Would you like to trade your pair of pages from issue #91 for these two pages?"

















































Me: "No"

Him: "Would you like to buy them for $3000?"

Me: "No"

March 23 2007

Take a quick gander at the first comment that j_ay left, if you have not already, under the March 20 post.

Meet you back here in a moment.




[dum-dee-dum-dum... looks at fingernails... checks the time... scratches inappropriately for a public setting...]





OK, good. You're back.

J_ay! I *really* like the idea of Dave Sim writing a Captain America arc.

Of course, when you think about Dave Sim writing that... it would totally end up being a "Waiting for Godot" between Captain America and Captain Canuck.

And after 12 issues of talking about painful boots and tight-fitting masks... twinky sidekicks and shrewsome girlfriends... bladder infections and the heartbreak of resurrection, the last 2 frames simply write themselves.

Cap C: Well? Shall we go save the world?

Cap A: Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

[You know... this could become the "Aristocrats" of the comic book world. Your 20-page, 24-hour comic needs to end with this dialog as the punch line. OK, that's two awesome ideas in one post. Someone PLEASE steal them; just make them happen.]

March 20 2007 And he said...

I have to admit, this is, in the words of the most famous ficticious Vulcan... "fascinating" ...

DVS: "Well, there are a lot of financial and legal implications of me re-acquiring Ger's 40% of the company and we're just at the start of that process. There are things we can't do because of accounting/tax implications and there are things we can't do because of legal implications so there's a lot of bouncing back and forth between Mark, our accountant and Wilf, our lawyer up ahead. I'll try and keep everyone updated on my side of things – Jeff Seiler has a long letter here which gets into a lot of the nitty-gritty of my own situation and I'll try to answer as much of that as I can. I really can't speak for Gerhard and Gerhard doesn't do a whole lot of speaking on his own behalf and I can't see that changing especially now that he's able to walk away from the Cerebus spotlight. I mean, it's really no big problem since Cerebus is such a marginal thing to begin with. If he doesn't come into the office and he doesn't follow the Yahoo newsgroup, he can already be leading a completely Cerebus-free existence. If that's what he wants (and I suspect that is very much what he wants) then it's unlikely that he would want to discuss "where it all went wrong" from his point of view."

"There's a big part of me that really envies that. Like the guys with nine-to-five-jobs where when they punch out at the end of the day they can stop thinking about it."

"I don't think that's who I am or who I could ever be, but a big part of me really envies that."

March 19 2007 He said, She said... (VIII)

Final installment.

Wiley says he might have some of these originals left in the vault.

My reservation is in for as many as he has.

March 17 2007 He said, She said... (VII)

March 14 2007 He said, She said... (VI)

March 13 2007 He said, She said... (V)

March 12 2007 News flash!

No one wants a (blue ball-point?) drawing of Jaka for $50.

What a surprise!

...not.














ended: March 11, 2007
eBay item no. 320089023523
Seller:mumouse
Buyer: none
opening bid: $49.99
bidders: 0

March 10 2007 This just in...

Just following up on my End-of-the-World post from the other day. I was over at wikipedia checking out Friday the thirteenth, and they have this chart of the months and years during the 21st century there will be a Friday the thirteenth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_13

They include 2001 thru 2028 on their chart.

ahem... no sense going into 2029 because...

...THAT DAMNED ASTEROID IS GOING TO EAT OUR LUNCH ON APRIL 13TH!

Oh, right, And check out the optimistic look at 2029 itself on wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2029

And the news about the asteroid, whose name is Apophis...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis

By the way: in Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness.

Check out the history of the estimates...

March 10 2007 He said, She said... (IV)

March 9 2007 April 13, 2026

We interrupt this series of really cute cartoons for a Public Service Announcement about the End of the World.

First, let's review. Our friends at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory maintain a program called NEO (near earth objects; http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov). Mainly, these are asteroids whose paths are being watched because we think we know what happened because the dinosaurs did not have an NEO program of their own, 65 million years ago (http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2004/168.html).

So, OK. What constitutes "near" in the minds of these astrogeeks?

In 2004, they decided that Asteroid 4179 was "close." Here are some drawings of 4179 passing "close" to the earth. There are a few things to note: (a) take a look at the orbit of the moon relative to the position of 4179 (named "Toutatis") in the first drawing, and (b) take a look at how far below the plane of the ecliptic it is in the second drawing. This defines "close."



































OK, you calibrated now? Good.

Now you know what consitutes "close" from the astrogeeks at the JPL NEO program.

Here's a drawing of our anticipated close encounter with 2004MN at the point where the computers tell us it will be closest to the Earth, on April 13, 2029.


















Now that, my friends, is what I call close.

A couple of years ago, our friends at the NEO program declared that their computers decided that they had conclusively ruled out a collision (see the white probability dots for the possible paths that the computers tell us that 2004MN will take).

I was never particularly comforted by this because it seemed to me that a rounding error one way or the other could move this little set of white dots in our direction (or, 50:50 chance) away from us. And predictive computer programs, as good as they are, need to take everything into account (the LaPlacian conundrum) in order to be really good, and how do you know you have all the variables that affect asteroids that are cruising through the distortions (gravity wells) that massive objects make in the space-time continuum?

Noooooow we get to yesterday, and this really interesting report of how the spins of irregularly shaped objects (like asterids) are affected by sunlight. The astrogeeks are giddy with this. Here's a little bit from the Reuters release:


WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Sunlight can cause asteroids to spin more quickly, scientists said Wednesday, showing anew just how dynamic a place our solar system can be.

International teams of scientists studying two asteroids, one about a mile wide and the other about 375 feet wide, confirmed a previously unproven theory that sunlight can affect the rotation of asteroids because they tend to be irregularly shaped and not perfectly round.

Stephen Lowry of Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland said the findings boost the understanding of the physical properties and dynamics of asteroids -- hunks of metal and rock rattling around in space.

"This is important as asteroids are leftovers from the formation of the solar system, along with comets, and so by studying them we gain insights into what the solar system was like some 4.5 billion years ago," Lowry said by e-mail.
In research appearing in the journals Nature and Science, the scientists focused on the so-called YORP effect, named for four scientists who inspired the theory.

The idea is the sun's heat serves as a propulsion engine on the irregular features of an asteroid's surface. "YORP can accelerate or decelerate the rotation rate," Mikko Kaasalainen of the University of Helsinki in Finland said by e-mail.
When sunlight hits the asteroid, the solar energy is absorbed and then radiated back into space. When the asteroid is not spherical, this can create a push off parts of its surface that alters its spin.

"Depending on the exact shape, the effect on the entire asteroid's surface can lead to a net torque, which can slowly alter the time it takes the asteroid to make one full revolution," Lowry said.




Guys, guys... that is all well and good. But I wanna know if and when the computer programs over at NEO are going to take this news into account in the next software update?

Did I mention that I skipped ahead to April 2029 on my iCal program?

Anyone want to guess what day of the week April 13 falls on in 2029?

Anyone?

Anyone?

That's right. 2004MN and its little white dots are going to be at perigee on Friday the 13th.



We are so fucked. I'm telling you right now.

March 8 2007 He said, She said... (III)

March 6 2007 He said, She said... (II)

March 4 2007 He said, She said...

Wiley Miller is a friggin' genius. I think his non-sequitur is so flat-out funny nearly all of the time. I've picked up a number of his original strips over the years. Given the recent run of "14 Impossible things to believe" over at 'Blog'n'Mail' (or is that, 'blogging male?' or...), I think I'll run some durn funny installments from the "He said, She said" series of non-sequitur strips that Sir Wiley did a while back (I do not own these, unfortunatement...)