Cockrum, Dave

Greetings to all. I have written in the past that I do not have Comic Art ‘Grails’. Instead, I have Comic Art ‘Quests’. I usually pursue interior pages from a few key artists in my collection, but I do dabble in the occasional covers when they become available. As most of you will observe, I am a Marvel guy with most of my pieces from the 1970s and 1980s. It is rare that one can complete multiple quests in one month, and I have done this with the completion of my third Comic Art ‘Quest’. Here is the story on the first part of the quest. In 1996, I purchased my first Dave Cockrum early X-Men page at the SDCC. It was an interior page from X-Men 98. At that time, I had not identified this as a quest yet, but a chance meeting in Ohio changed my position in 1997 with my buying and selling a page from X-Men 99. I purchased the page in SDCC from Albert Moy and sold it four months later to Brad Johnson at the Mid-Ohio Con. Brad indicated that he was trying to put X-Men 94 back together. It was from my meeting with Brad Johnson that I developed my desire to acquire a page from each issue of X-Men 94 to 107 before they were all gone from the marketplace. So, I developed my next quest to collect a page from each issue. I eliminated Giant Size X-Men 1 from the quest. While it does represent the first appearance of the new X-Men from Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, I did not read the issue until the 1980s, and, for me, it did not hold the same prominence for me with regards to my desired collectability status. I may one day acquire a page from this issue to say that I have owned a page from GS 1. X-Men 106 has proven to be the most difficult issue to complete this third quest. Dave only drew three pages from this issue, pages 1, 2, and 31. Most everyone knows who owns page 1, and the chances of my acquiring that page were laughable without a Donnelly translator. Page 31 has never appeared on the open market. Thus, page 2 was the best target to go after. Chuck Costas owned this page for several years, and he posted it on eBay back in early 2002. Being unemployed at that time, I did not have the resources to go after this page fully. This page sold for less than $1,000 at that time on eBay. I had to continue biding my time until this page once again became available. Fortunately, my 10 year wait was well worth the time when Mike Burkey posted this page on his website. I did not miss the page this time. If you perform the math, Dave penciled approximately 18 interior pages from each issue of his first run with the exception being the three pages from X-Men 106. That is a total of 219 interior pages and 14 covers for a grand-sum total of 233 X-Men covers and pages. This does not include his second run, and this does not include the GS 1 pages. If you add up all the pages from GS 1, his first and second runs, then he is comparable to John Byrne, Rick Leonardi, Jim Lee, John Romita, Jr., Werner Roth, and Marc Silvestri in output with X-Men pages penciled over the first 300 issues. I can think of only two other groups of people that can boast of owning a page from each issue from 94-107. One is certain, but the other is not. The certain one is the brothers Donnelly who own a page from each issue based on what they have posted on the Internet. The uncertain one is Brad Johnson. Brad has refused to answer any e-mail messages that I have sent him over the years. For me, it would be most interesting to learn what he owns and if he owns the last page to X-Men 106.