Saturday 3 September 2016

2:10 PM $27,607 PLEDGED! MANY THANKS TO ALL!

The design of the interior of the vault -- as I think makes sense with all comic art -- would be a LOT of very narrowly spaced storage shelves, narrowly spaced to the extent that maybe five 11 x 17 pages would fit comfortably in each one.

So, between 600 and 700 shelves.

This will make finding and accessing the pages easier.  If you know the issue number, the page number in that issue and/or the trade paperback page number, you find the shelf and...there it is...with only the three or four pages on either side of it.

This brings us to the "I have no idea" point that I'm at with it:  who is it that's accessing the pages in the vault?

You have person 1 and person 2 who have entered their respective combinations and they're now IN the vault.  Presumably the insurance company isn't going to want to have their employee (?) there any longer than it takes to open the vault.  So, I think we're talking about the bonded security guard and I think he or she actually gets sealed IN the vault for as long as the visitor wants to look at the artwork.

 Outside the vault, you have the Studio which consists of a drawing board -- wide enough to hold, say, a half dozen pages under non-reflective bulletproof glass, as thin as you can make it and still have it completely indestructible.  The visitor specifies which pages they want to see, the security guard finds them on the shelves, and inserts them from inside the vault into the glass-covered drawing board.  If the visitor is artist AA BB or AABB, they can then pull out their drawing materials, adjust the glass drawing board to their comfortable angle for drawing and then set to work.  Any ink gets spilled, it can be easily cleaned up off the glass.

If the visitor ISN'T an artist, then all they would do is prioritize before they got to the Off-White House which pages they want to look at, how many pages they want to look at and for how long based on how long they can afford to engage the security guard.  (And how long they can get their "Rachel" to sit still, Sean) :)

There's a potential design/interface problem, I think, with the integrity of the vault for insurance purposes because you have the Studio attached.  For the artist's purposes, you want the glass to be as thin as possible: it has to be as close as possible to working ON the page on the same plane as the artist's working page.  Anything more than, say, 1/4" and you're going to get into visual focal length adjustments that are going to wear on you as an artist.  For the insurance company's purposes, you want the glass to be as thick as possible.

I'm guessing that there's probably SOME kind of glass that has been created or will be created that will represent a compromise between the two.

The glass, however bulletproof, might also be an insurance company "deal-breaker".  Glass? No, no. Tempered steel six inches thick ALL the way around.  It's a VAULT, not a candy store.    

4 comments:

Mouse Skull Entertainment said...

Dave,

On the "Is it real or is it Kickstarter" question? After I posted that I remembered looking at the original paintings at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA.

I can see why seeing the "real" pages would be preferable to seeing the "Kickstarter" pages.

I wonder if it will be possible to rig up a camera and monitor system whereby the Archive personnel could place a page in a holder in the vault below a camera and then out in the artist area is a high end top notch monitor that allows Artist AA, BB, or AABB to see the page in Ultra-Mega-Amazingly-Awesome High Definition (with digital zoom and a connection to a printer)?

I mean not today, but in the shiny chrome World Of Tomorrow (ow ow ow!!!) of ten years from now.

Matt DOw

Unknown said...

Mm. No. Definitely not. No matter how high your high definition is, what you're seeing is pixilated: it isn't a pen line, it's a series of dots creating the illusion of a pen line.

It's almost physically painful for me to look at my HEART OF JULIET JONES collections now: particularly the stories where they had ALL the strips at Syracuse University. I looked at enough of them "in person" that I now know what Stan Drake's actual drawings of the period look like and how exponentially better those drawings are than ANY reproduction. The full-sized photocopies I paid to have done are close, but even when those came in, it's like "AAARGHHH! I know what these actually look like!! Am I NEVER going to see that again?"

Well, yeah.

But I'd have to go back to Syracuse University.

Unknown said...

Your example of the paintings at the Rockwell Museum is a good one -- and actually an even more extreme example because you're talking about oil paint which is WAY more difficult to reproduce accurately. The postcards at an art exhibit look much better on the way in than they do on the way out -- AFTER you've actually seen the paintings. A painter mixes his colour to suit his eye, whereas a scanner has to break it down into x amount of magenta, x amount of black, x amount of cyan and x amount of yellow. And then the printing press has to do the same thing. Compared to original paintings, books and postcards are just mud.

But, you'll still have to pry my Rockwell books out of my cold, dead fingers. :)

Tony Dunlop said...

"When Rockwell is outlawed, only outlaws will have Rockwell."