This morning I woke up to the smell of burnt toast.

At first I was hoping it was a heart attack, but then I remembered that I attempted to make garlic toast to go with my pasta lunch yesterday and ended up burning it to a cinder. Because I forgot I had put it in the oven. Because my Whirlpool oven is so fucking stupid that you can't leave the door open when you're broiling something or else the oven turns off. Which means it's painfully easy to put something under the broiler and burn it because you can't keep an eye on it. I don't know if this is just my model or what. But never, ever buy a Whirpool oven when this is a possibility. Every time I have to broil something I'm like WHO THE FUCK DESIGNS AN OVEN LIKE THIS?!?

The butternut squash pasta with brown butter, crispy-fried sage, and pepitas was excellent though. Dang is that such an easy and delicious dish. And cooking it makes my home smell like a movie theater with lots of buttered popcorn. And, this time, burnt garlic toast.

But anyway...

I had mentioned some of the stuff hanging on my walls and got a question about it.

My favorite living comic book artist is Amanda Conner. She's phenomenal. The way she illustrates a story is so flawlessly suited to comic books. She has this incredible sense for crafting body and facial expressions to add to the story. And one of my favorite comic book characters is Vartox. He started as a wacky Zardoz imitation in a cool Superman story. But what he became in the pages of Power Girl is amazing. He's hilarious. So years and years ago when I saw three pages of original artwork by Amanda Conner from issue 12 featuring Vartox for sale? I jumped on them. Did I have the money? No. Did I care that I didn't have the money? No. I just bought them. Pages 13, 15, and 17 were mine.

To display them, I added printed scans from the comic for pages 11*, 14, and 16 (sorry I didn't straighten them out)...

Click image to see the embiggened photo.

The art I bought was relatively cheap (the majority of each page are unpopular characters)... nothing compared to the cost of original Amanda Conner cover art... which is currently $4,000 to over $10,000 per page. So, yeah, profoundly grateful I was about to get what I got. Especially since it has Vartox in it. Conner doesn't do a lot of comic book art any more, so finding anything that's remotely affordable is nigh-impossible today.

Even though the art isn't particularly valuable, it means a lot to me. Which is why I nearly had a heart attack when it ended up lost after I moved house a decade ago. I had put it in a pile for me to take, but it got grabbed by the movers instead. Eventually I found that they had tucked it in-between some posters that got wrapped up. Posters that sat for almost a year before I unwrapped them. Talk about your happy surprises. I had long accepted that the pages got lost in the move!

When I started buying picture frames to start framing up all the stuff I had in storage, these were the first that I ordered. And I went all out... bought the UV-protective glass so they ink wouldn't fade. Then made sure I put them in a place which received no direct sunlight, just in case.

And now I can easily look at them whenever I want, which is often because they're some beautiful pages.

   
*I went with printing page 11 instead of 12 because I love that 11 featured her getting a cat!