Q&A with Roger K.

Which piece in your gallery is your favorite and why?

That's tough because I have a lot of art that's special to me for different reasons. When I answered this questionnaire a few years back, it was my Murphy Anderson Planet Comics page because that was the first piece of original art I ever bought. Since then, I've managed to acquire a Frazetta Thund'a page, a WW2 Green Hornet cover and a number of other pieces that could all be my favorite. If pressed to pick one, I've got to go with my JLA #21 page. It's the first appearance of the JSA in that title, and I grew up anticipating those yearly crossovers.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I've been the co-owner of a graphic services company for the past 35-plus years. I live a (mostly) quiet life with my wife, dog, cat and chickens. In addition to comic art, I also collect books (of all types), platinum-age comics, character-based tin toys and anything drawn by Ralph Steadman. In an alternate universe I am a neurosurgeon. I like pudding.

How long have you been collecting comic art and what prompted you to start?

I went to HoustonCon 1978 with five mid-grade issues of Crack & Smash (with Lou Fine art). I traded them to a dealer for the Anderson Planet page (I still have) and a Fiction House jungle girl story that looked like Kamen. I traded the Jungle Girl story for a dealer toward an Amazing Fantasy 15 a friend wanted and used the money he gave me for that to get a copy of Police Comics 1. Those were the days! A few years later, that same friend and I picked up a collection of a few thousand gold-, silver- and bronze-age books from a classified ad in the local paper and started selling at regional conventions. Whenever we would sell in Houston, a guy (the late, great Jeff Jatras) would always bring us art to trade for comics. That's how I picked up some of the pieces that became the foundation of my collection. I put collecting on the back burner for a while after that, until the mid-90s when I started buying art again. I haven't stopped.

How do you display/store your collection at home?

Some on frames on the walls of my comic room, and others in mylars in a dark underground bunker... I mean trunk. Sometimes I hope something might be cool enough to land somewhere else in the house, but that usually doesn't happen.

What are your top five most wanted original pages or commissions?

#1. The perfect Ploog. #2. Paul Neary Hunter pages. (Where are they all?) #3. Anything by Winsor McCay (also Lou Fine, Mac Raboy, Carl Barks.) #4. A Ryan Sook Kamandi Wednesday Comics page would be nice. #5. A Lou Fine Golden Age Page with Ray or Black Condor.