Avengers # 68 Pg. 18

This one has a neat story behind it... over 25 years ago my fiancee (now wife) Lynn and I drove to Charlotte, North Caroline to sit with Mike Zeck and help sell some of his artwork at one of Shelton Drumm's great Heroes Conventions. Mike was the first artist whose artwork I sold and it was always a fun time to hang out with him whenever I could.

Upon our arrival at the venue, Lynn and I found Mike's table and sat down by him. At the table next to us was Sam Grainger and I saw he had a stack of artwork available for sale, so I went over to have a look. Sam had an amazing assortment of pages that Marvel had recently returned to him; included were several vintage Hulk pages he inked over Herb Trimpe, Iron Man pages from # 25 he had inked over Johnny Craig, a Barry Smith page featuring Kazar from Astonishing Tales, and at least one page from Avengers # 68 he inked over Sal Buscema. I asked him for prices of the pages and he said $10 each! At the time, comic art had not taken off in value, but even then, I knew $10 a page was a good deal!

I think I had $100 to spend at the show, and I gave it all to Sam. He was really surprised that folks wanted to buy the pages as he had not associated any value with them; Marvel had only recently begun to return artwork and they sent him a bunch of pages from the 1960's and 70's and they were taking up space at his place!

I am pretty sure he gave me a couple of extra pages for free since I bought so many. I asked him to personalize a handful of the pages I really liked and walked away a happy collector!

Over the years, I sold or traded off many of the pages I had picked up from Sam (I have limited resources for comic art and could not keep everything!); among the pages I let go was this Avengers page. Flash forward to a few weeks ago and an art customer from many moons ago contacted me to see if I was interested in helping them sell some pieces they had bought from me back in the 1980's and 1990's. I was happy to do so and one of the pieces fetched a hefty sum; rather than taking cash as a commission, I asked if I could get back a couple of the pages they had bought from me all those years ago. They agreed to this payment option and everyone involved was very happy with the deal!

As the previous owner was preparing to send me the page, they noticed one of the panels had an overlay and it had popped off. They sent me a picture of the page with the overlay removed and there was a really cool pencil drawing of Thor which had been covered by the redrawn panel. The owner was concerned that I might not want the page with the panel popped off, but that just made me like it that much more as I had no idea the final panel had been pasted on when I previously owned the page!

I am very happy to have this nostalgic gem back in my collection and have included scans of it with, and without, the overlayed panel (which is original art, not a stat).