Original Comic Book Art And The Collectors - TwoMorrows

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Collectors Hari Naidu and Bill Woo
Dr. Srihari (Hari) Naidu is an interventional cardiologist
who specializes in angioplasty and
stenting at New York-Presbyterian Hospital
(Cornell). He’s won numerous awards including
the Bristol Myers-Squibb forum of excellence.
He’s also a Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society
Award winner at Brown University, his alma mater. “I can go
to almost any city in this country and find someone who
would welcome me with open arms. I have had people pick
me up at my hotel and treat me to dinner, show me around
and take care of me in a foreign city.” In Chicago he was
treated to the same deferential. A local lawyer picked him up
and ferried him to a Northside bar where for Dr. Naidu the
drinks were on the house. None of this bonhomie he enjoys,
however, has anything to do with Dr. Naidu’s profession. Hari
Naidu has a deep passion for collecting original comic book
art, a passion he shares with collectors across the world.
For those outside the hobby, put simply and in block letters,
original comic art is the original art crafted by a confluence
of writing and artistic talents, which is then reproduced
in a reduced format for the production of comic books. It is
a series of sequential images, much like the frames of a
movie, that tell a tale through snapshot images of a story.
They are the bastard child of the pulp magazines and comic
strips, outcasts of literary and artistic circles alike. And even
though a patina of respect first for their longevity and now for
their cross-over film appeal has released comic books from
their ignominy, the art itself, ironically, is largely overlooked
outside of the subculture of comic art collectors.
Comic art collecting is a tenacious hobby tangential to
comic book collecting, which has escalated voraciously in
price and stature from the level of obscure novelty to the chic
GRAILPAGES
CHAPTER 1
OVERVIEW: WHAT IS COMIC BOOK ART?
“Being a collector is a very strange thing, probably some mental illness…” – Michel Maillot
Silver Surfer #14 (Mar. 1970), pg. 1, pencils: John Buscema, inks: Dan Adkins.
OPPOSITE: The Amazing Spider-Man #75 (Aug. 1969), cover, pencils and inks: John Romita. Characters TM & ©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.
Book GRAILPAGES: Original Comic Book Art and the Collectors pg. # 9
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