Thursday, October 23, 2008

Howiewatha


Back in my heyday of comic collecting (mid-late 70's), I was more interested in the artists that created the art than the investment value of first appearances, origin issues and #1 editions. I amassed an impressive collection of Amazing Spiderman's and pretty much any title in the Marvel catalogue at that time. One phenomenon from 1976 was the comic book, Howard The Duck that caught the attention of collectors with it's fowl-mouthed "man-duck", Howard, who smoked cigars and had a lovely sidekick, Bev. This comic was intriguing because at the time most of the Marvel line-up was your standard superhero types who fought bad guys, but Howard was a bit of an anti-hero fighting ordinary, often bizarre characters in odd offbeat situations...Kidney Woman, Space Turnip, rock band Kiss, a presidential campaign, Son of Satan, and the Defenders were just some of the silly plot lines. Actually the comic started out promising, but eventually it got too stupid and badly illustrated and then that awful, horrible movie! Definitely killed the buzz! Howard The Duck originally spun-off from Fear #19 in a Man-Thing story, somehow through this Howard got his own book.

Anyways, the catch for me was the art for the first two issues by Frank Brunner. Brunner was known as a fabulously detailed fantasy artist who was best known for illustrating issues of Doctor Strange and Man-Thing. I once met Brunner at a comic con in Calgary in the 70's (I have no idea what year?) and he signed a print of his "Scarface Duck" and briefly chatted about comics, very cool! I bring up all this comic talk because I recently purchased an original drawing by Frank Brunner (see top photo) from eBay. I occasionally browse eBay as I dream of owning some original comic art, but for now this is all I can afford. I think this is a nice piece because, though it's just a sketch, it is well detailed and it was drawn (1976) during Brunner's height of success with Marvel and not at a recent comic con. Now about framing?

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