You may recognise it from this:
Hell yeah. The cover to Firestorm #8 by Matt Haley. This thing is sweet. In one of my art posts during the year, I posted a pic of some prelim sketches by Matt for the Firestorm #11 cover (one of my favourite covers ever). I figured that was as close to owning one of his covers as I was ever likely to get, atleast anytime soon. Being a regular on eBay, cover art goes for hundreds, even for obscure titles. So yeah, no chance...
At some stage I stumbled across the Comic Art Source website, which has some pretty cool stuff on it. They were offering this cover for $500US, which is actually a pretty decent price (Matt Haley Firestorm covers currently on eBay are asking $650+), but was still miles outside my budget. Then a couple of months ago I was bored and clearing out my bookmarks, and found this site again. And behold, they were having a sale! The cover was now $300! Still expensive, but not excessive (well, relatively speaking, heh). I thought about it for a couple of days, then emailed them asking various questions about it. I was pretty nervous paying that sort of money to someone outside of the likes of eBay. I did a google search on them and they seemed legit, but still, anyone could put up a fake website and end up scamming you out of the money.
I decided to go for it, in the time honoured tradition of buying ones self a christmas present (atleast that's how I justified spending close to $500NZ on a drawing hah). There was a pretty big lack of communication, atleast from my nervous perspective, which didn't help with my confidence. It was about 3 weeks after I paid the money until things started moving, but hey, that's life. It's here now. And it was packaged like a freaking tank. It arrived stuck to a bloody big piece of wood!
That's insane. But very very appreciated. By far the best packaging job I've recieved, and I must've had a dozen or so deliveries of art from the US this year.
As you might expect, I'm incredably stoked to have this. I paused to take a few pics of it, then it was straight into a frame and onto my wall. I replaced a Pat Olliffe page from Firestorm #18 with it. I need to get a new matt for it, the green one I had doesn't really work, but it will do for now.
That's about the only spot in my room that doesn't get bombarded by direct sunlight. I went so far as to frame it still inside it's protective bag, which may be a bit wimpy of me, but I'll reassess once the drooling has stopped. I stop and look at it every time I'm passing.
A few closer pics:
Who's an angry boy then? Love that face.
There's a ton of whiteout on it. There's a fair bit used for correction on the faces of Jason and his parents, but on the Firestorm figure it's used for effect.
It's sort of blended in to break things up and smooth the transition from white to black, which is an interesting idea.
I'm being strong willed and not looking at eBay anymore, think I need to wait a while before I start buying anything else ;)
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