The long road to lost art: Ablating my hopes
As the central location for all thing having to do with Iron Man’s Ablative Armor, aka Model 23, erroneously aka Model 24, and perfectly named Axol because that’s his name, you won’t be surprised to know that I’m on the hunt for anything even remotely related to this armor in any way. I’ve tracked down every image of it both licensed and unlicensed, contacted the creator, and hunted down ablative items that have nothing to do with Iron Man at all. And, of course, I’m looking for the original art from any of Axol’s few appearances in Marvel comics.
So far I’ve only found the owner of a single piece, and that’s the cover of Iron Man #416 (vol. 3, #71). Unfortunately, he’s not willing to sell, but he was kind enough to share pics.
Original pencils to the cover for Iron Man #416.
While the owner is not willing to sell, he pointed me to a site that had some art for sale from the two issues the Ablative Armor appears in. I was completely unfamiliar with the world of original art and didn’t really know the best way to search for it. When I went to the site, I believe there were about 10 pieces of Robert Teranishi art from those issues, and one…only one…had the Ablative Armor. All the rest were non-armor narrative pieces of the story.
And that one piece was wonderful.
Iron Man #416, page 15.
It hurts just looking at it, which, spoiler alert, tells you that I don’t own it. It just has so much of what makes the Ablative what it is. The tiles in action. The antenna array that improves its communication in space. The polymer kiln on its back. Tiles shown on the fingers, proving how small they get. Breaking through a wall! If I were going to have any page other than the page that actually intros the armor, this would be it. And it was listed for only $75. For original art. That would have been a centerpiece for this site.
The guy selling it was the agent for Eric Cannon, the inker of the issue. Though he’s getting a new website, the one that’s currently up looks like it’s from 1997, and I am 100% not kidding. So I contact the agent, and he says he’ll check. So I wait a couple of weeks and write again. And again. And he says he’ll be in touch. And I wait, probably about six months, maybe more. And when he gets in touch he had some really good reasons for not getting back, but also lets me know that the site hadn’t been updated in a couple of years and that the piece in question was long gone.
I mean, after that long I’d already given up anyway. I had long resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to get it. But it still hurt to hear.
This experience has taught me something important – I’m not an original comic art kind of guy. There’s one copy of this piece of art in the world, and it’s most likely sitting in someone’s draw along with dozens of other pieces of original art that they’ll never look at, never to appear on the open market in my lifetime. Why even pull such a piece out to sell when they don’t know that anyone is looking for it? I like the thrill of the hunt, but I’m not going to hunt for something that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Melodramatic? Sure. But also pretty realistic.
So, if you own this piece of art…can I have it?
