Amy pointed out this lovely Myspace weblog entry from a lady who subs at the Arlington Library, and who, in her youth, dated the late X-Men artist Dave Cockrum. Last month she brought a Cockrum cover to Antiques Roadshow:

I am finally bringing my cover to X-Men #99. My one wild oat was that I dated Dave Cockrum, X-Men artist, in 1976. (My little bit of immortality was that he added the surname of Neramani to the character Lilandra, an empress. “Neramani” is an anagram for “Marianne.”) Anyway, after waiting a long time, we finally got to the collectibles table at 4pm. The appraiser there said the comic page appraiser had left early, but that I had to know that my cover was worth in the 10s of thousands of dollars. Yikes! He ballparked it at $25,000. I recently spoke to the other appraiser, and he ballparked it between $50,000 to $75,000! All this for a piece of bristol, pencil and ink! I recall that Dave used to get $800 for an X-Men book.

So not only did she date Dave Cockrum around the time he was working on The Phoenix Saga, was the Shi’ar Empress‘ anagrammatic namesake, AND held an X-Men #99 cover worth thousands — but my wife also knows her from work! How cool is that?

(You realize of course that this also means that I’m now just four degrees of separation from Stan Lee. And Rob Liefeld. And Magneto.)