Personal Collection // George  Tuska // Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #02 (Tuska/Graham) (1972)

August 1972, Luke Cage, Hero For Hire #2, Page #3, George Tuska pencils/Billy Graham inks, "Vengeance Is Mine!" This is the 1st panel page appearance of Claire Temple, Luke Cage’s love interest. Claire Temple is the ex-wife of Bill Foster aka Black Goliath, who died in Civil War. Claire ended up working for a health clinic with Noah Burstein, the man who put Luke Cage through the procedure that gained him his powers. She fell in love with Luke, and even left the east coast to see Bill in order to divorce him, implying that she was getting serious with Cage. In the end Claire left Cage because she was tired of the constant danger that came with loving him. Here is the modern connection: In Netflix’s Daredevil, Rosario Dawson is cast as Claire Temple, a nurse. She is always around to patch Daredevil up when he gets hurt. But it’s too dangerous and she did get beat up real badly just for being in his life. So Claire leaves Daredevil but I’m sure she will show up in the Netflix Luke Cage series that will begin in 2016. Claire is an intergral part of Luke Cage’s life and Rosario is a great actress so Im sure she will be back. Here is my story behind this panel page: Back in 2004, I had already bought a few Luke Cage panel pages for $50 each, and this page came up on Ebay. I wanted it bad. It should have sold for $75-125, but I wanted to make sure I got it, so I bid last second an unheard of $906 and …. I was outbid. It was not real. I bid 8 times what the page was “worth” and I lost out. Eleven years later, I see this same page on Heritage (early 2015). I was not to be denied twice. So I bid at the live auction but someone was outbidding me. So I dropped out, I could not bid higher. I was so upset that I would miss out on getting this page in my collection twice, but I licked my wounds and took it like a man. Amazingly, this page sold for an astounding $4,550. I tried to reach out to a few collectors after the auction to see who paid that amount for this page, to no avail. No one knew who it was. A few months later, I get an email from a John in MA and he tells me the story that he was the winner. He was a new art collector and he got caught up in the bidding war. We were able to work out a price for this page so it could come home to my collection. Believe it or not! After 11 years, here it is.

Personal Collection

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