11:12 AM $27,447 PLEDGED! MANY, MANY THANKS

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HAS PLEDGED FOR CAN5, THE "STRIPPED DOWN"KICKSTARTER! QUICKER DELIVERY GUARANTEED THIS TIME 

(GOD WILLING) 

A HUGE problem with original comic art as a learning tool is the vulnerability factor.  Obviously, if an artist is studying original comic art and trying to learn from it, the best way is to work NEXT to it and working next to it mean bringing a bottle of India ink into direct proximity to it.  Heart attack city. Even though the number of unhappy accidents with bottles of India ink that occur in the average comic artist's life are anecdotal.  A minor spill on your own work once every ten years or so is just part of the price of doing business.  

[Russ Heath tells the story of being George Wunder's assistant. Wunder used to have a pan of India ink instead of a bottle -- which is logical. You can "dip" your brush randomly in the pan in the way you can't with a bottle.  Multiply a few split seconds times the hundreds of times you "dip" in the course of a page of artwork and it is a time saver.  Wunder had turned around to say something to Heath and when he turned back, the sleeve of his jacket dragged through the pan and across a nearly completed Sunday page.  "Damn." he said.  Just one "damn", tore the page in half and started over]

YOUR work is one thing, the work of an artist who has been dead for fifty years and who produced the page a hundred years ago is something else again.  

But, to me, that just makes it a problem.  You SOLVE a problem.  You don't let it defeat you.  

A related HUGE problem with original comic artwork is insuring it.  It's almost impossible to insure because it has a bad insurance profile.  Just about the worst.  It's easily portable for one thing. No matter how you store it, a PILE of it can be moved quite easily. As opposed to, say, framed paintings (close to the worst insurance profile).  How does the insurance company know that someone stole it?  How do they know you didn't "steal" it yourself?  

Up to now, I've been working towards storing the artwork at a facility that has a good insurance profile. Like a bank vault.  The benefit of the bank vault is that it's designed for Zero Unauthorized Access. Not "close to zero".  Zero.  However, moving in the direction of a good insurance profile means moving almost completely away from any "learning tool" profile.  Artist AA or BB or AABB can't get into the bank vault.  That's the point of the bank vault.  

That's when I started working, mentally, on my own model:  the Comic Art Bank Vault Studio.  

THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR THEIR CONTINUED SUPPORT OF CAN5 AND ALL OF OUR RESTORATION/REMASTERING/PRESERVATION EFFORTS ON THE 6,000 PAGE CEREBUS GRAPHIC NOVEL!