John E.

Happy New Year, Comic Art Addicts! I am creating this sale listing for my pal, Mel. He is selling a Gumby pinup by Art Adams, published in Gumby the Collected Edition (Wildcard Ink, 2007). This is the Gumby series written by Bob Burden and drawn by Rick Geary. The series won an Eisner in 2007 for "Best Title for Younger Readers/Publication for a Younger Audience." What a piece to get the new year started! The art is 12"x9" and appears to be matted, but Mel says it is not framed. SOLD! If you are interested in this piece, please contact Mel Smith directly at wildcardink@yahoo.com Thanks! John Espinoza

Since we’re talking about fuzzy memory, but didn’t @delekkerste own this cover and recently just sold it (presuming here)? Maybe it was a different cover for the series? I’d love to know how well he did on it maybe 5k was a steal? Interesting topic. I can’t think of a time when I panicked with a high bid because I’m already conservative with my buying. There are many times when I’ve thrown in small tracking bids on pieces I was excited about but when the final auction day came around, my excitement had tempered. Usually because a better piece popped up. I guess this is different than wishing to be outbid. About a year ago or so, a Skottie Young cover that had gone stale popped up on eBay with a .99 cent auction. I threw in a measly $26 bid and became the high bidder. Upon closer scrutiny I realized I was bidding on a fake. That’s when I was begging to be outbid.

I’m only looking for pages from one issue: Wolverine #43 (early Aug, 1991). But only from the last half of the book. It was a fill-in issue that followed the “Wolverine, I am your father, said Sabretooth” storyline. The first half of #43 really serves as an epilogue to #42, which I’m not really interested in. The last half of the book deals with the cover story featuring a deranged zookeeper named Linus. The issue is actually laid out by Marc, with Dan Green doing the finishes. In theory it should be affordable.

That's right. I now remember the most voted pieces being very clear cut. There was nothing confusing about the results.

The price seemed higher than usual. Should've known it was a flip. And to @Gungrave1036 Somebody just necro-bumped my 2-year old thread: "Why is it harder to find art from the 90s than it should be?" If you're looking for Marc Silvestri Wolverine art and the likes, it should be required reading

CAF user Adam Perlman just posted a Silvestri page from Wolverine 48. His asking price is $2000. I would post a link but I hate logging out/in of my CAF. Just as an aside, in the 5 1/2 years of collecting, I've been on the lookout for a Silvestri Wolverine page from my favorite issue with no dice. Marc's pages from his Wolverine run don't pop up often. When they do, they seem to be from the same issue or cluster of issues. What more, the pickins are slim; it's not always ( or hardly) "A" pages. This is to say good luck and be patient. Personally, I always appreciate it when these WTBs post fruitful results!

Hi Brian, I revisited the results of Best of 2017 and I noticed that the very top "entry" has very high votes, say like 70, but the "owner" and "title" are blank. Right below that will be what looks like the entry that received the most votes, say like 25, with the owner and title listed. The total number of entries that received at least one vote doesn't seem to match that "blank" entry. So I'm wondering what is meaning behind that high number? Thanks!

Yeah so weird. It takes me to my “selling” page.

Just revisiting a piece that I had previously predicted on: Superman 267 by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson This is just a good example of volatile prices on quick flips (whether or not the intention was to derive huge profits or not). The page sold on November 19, 2016 for an impressive $2,031.50 with the juice. Then again just over a year later on Jan 7, 2018 for $896.25 with the juice. What a bath. This it sold again yesterday, Dec 16, 2018, just a few weeks shy of the 1-year mark for $1,140. A little better but after fees I'd say breaking even is the best case scenario. I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but here you see wildly different ceilings and floors. You also get a median price which is helpful. I wonder what a fourth sale would bring in a year or two? I wonder if the second seller had just held on to it a little longer whether the piece would've done much better than $1140? There certainly was a lot of room for profit margin.

Ah man what a story. Well I’m glad it ended it with you who will steward the art after all the frustration. It was meant to be. Congrats again on the acquisition. Man, just re-reading your story shows how frustrating the hobby can be which makes me wonder how much a hobby it really is! I also wonder how well we would all do in Washington if we all woke up tomorrow as lobbyists and politicians!

congrats the price seemed reasonable to me. I’d love to read that book one day.

That Joe Jusko Punisher WJ was in my crosshairs but I decided to back off because I thought it was going to go higher than it did and I felt the Cockrum piece was easier to bag. That and I’m not a fan of oversized pieces—too troublesome for me to store. Those Punisher covers came from the Jason Taulbee collection who sold off something like 25-35 Punisher covers over the last year. This is all casual observation but very few were top notch covers that didn’t go cheap but I’m sure the winners were happy with the prices. Most of the covers were sold through Hake’s, eBay, and privately. Unless it was by Michael Golden, the covers sold anywhere between $700 and $1300. The market was able to absorb them all but there certainly were not bidding wars with the less-than-A-tier group. With Punisher covers a-plenty, anyone like me who wanted one in their collection got one, and so by the time the Jusko came around, which seems to be the last from the good batch, collectors were satiated. That’s why I think it fell below expectations. If I’m right that Taulbee has sold all his collection I’d be interested to see how often Punisher covers from the 90s era pop up and if they don’t do better, because for year it seemed like an endless supply.

All-digital creators can also supplement their income with commissions, convention sketches (the rates of both seem to be on the upward trajectory every year), and by selling their comp copies off their table, by selling prints (unlicensed, I’m sure) and charging fans $5 for signatures or $10 if the book is going to get slabbed. I think they’ll do okay 👌

Just curious: is that overlay original ink on vellum?

I thought you would have taken Comic Connect offerings down to move toward a complete story. But don’t you hate it when these pages pop up consecutively and with little time in between?

First, if Cinfa is a thing, then I’m going to go with Timbra A few years ago I also asked Timbra what his process was and his answer was incoherent. So I’m glad you got a straight answer. Greg Land’s art does nothing for me which is why I never offer my opinion, but be it that I like Timbra... So I stand to be corrected here because I don’t care enough about Greg Land’s work to do heavy research but from what little I know he seems to find photos on the interwebs (in the past, at least) and copy from that. Those “photo references” always looked shoehorned to me thus awkward thus terrible. If Timbra uses his own photo references, well to me that’s an age old tool in the artist’s tool kit. That’s what Alex Ross relies on, for example. His photo reference process has been documented since the beginning, and blatantly more so if you read his newest, Marvelocity. And yet that process doesn’t seem to affect his stature in the comics world. In Marvelocity, Ross (or author Chip Kidd) talks about how Ross just won’t rely on information in head; he needs the photo reference. This is random: I remember that Paul Chadwick’s “Killer Smile” TPb had some behind the scenes supplemental material in the back that included use of his own photo references. But both Ross and Chadwick are at least forming a composition in their head. They aren’t scanning the web, coming across something, then saying, Oh I’ll use that! I wish I knew more about Timbra’s “tracing” style. If I did maybe I’d change my evaluation of him. But in the meantime, Tim went from an inker to really coming to his own with a unique vision as a cover artist that I hadn’t seen before. Once the Punisher went “Max” the realism was well matched. It was also prescient. In just a year or so later after Tim’s cover work debuted, we witnessed 9/11, then later the Iraq War, then the constant barrage of bodies and beheadings, that Bradstreet’s reaslism—on the Punisher no less—served as a reflection of the anxieties we experienced during the first few years of the 21st century as sh-t got real real fast. That’s why, at the moment, I don’t mind the tracing.

Thanks for setting the record straight. Both of your friends bought well. That Mister Fantastic is underappreciated. The way his arm snakes through all that Kirby tech is wonderful. Then a Darkhawk “rookie card” for half the price? If your buddy hangs on to it he’s going to get a lot of value out of it for years to come.

I have two little ones, thus we read a lot of children’s books. Some of the art is great and it has crossed my mind to start collecting it. There are a few things that hold me back. First I don’t assume that illustrators of children’s books have the same incentive to sell as artists of comic books. With comics, an artists is drawing up 22 pages a month which stacks up. A CB illustrator? Maybe 22 “pages” a year? Every two years? Certainly not a month. With less work out there it’s probably more expensive and I don’t feel comfortable inquiring about purchasing work unless I have the funds to back it up. But what would that be? $800? $5000? Well for that kind of money I’ll would rather get another example from _____. Also, with less pages produced, the artist, I feel has a sentimental incentive not to sell. I approached one children’s book creator at an alternative comics expo who rebuffed my inquiry to buy some of his original art. Last October at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, this illustrator, Rafael Lopez, brought some of his OA to his talk which you can see here To me, he sees the OA as props. On the other hand, there’s Jeffrey Brown who crosses over from alternative comics to produce the Darth Vader and Son series, which is like both a comic and a children’s book. They are widely popular in their umpteenth printing. Jeffrey liberally sells his art so I jumped at the chance to get one which you can see here. This isn’t to say that’s it’s impossible to pry them loose or that there isn’t anything out in the market; these are just my thoughts. It’d be great to land the next Maurice Sendak, but I have also noticed that the quality of artwork in a book doesn’t always match the quality of the writing and I think you need that one-two punch. But to your point, yes, I think that right Book has the potential for investment because of all the eyeballs it can attract. Most books get read multiple times making it ripe for big time nostalgia which can pay off 40 years later, if you’re still alive. To be sure, at next year’s TBF I’ll be after more sketches from illustrators and I’ll be sure to inquire about their views toward selling their OA.

@tth2 I thought you were @tfish for the longest time until last week Then again, I’m making assumptions about tfish’s identity. But to him I ask, did these HoS pages go to your collection?

Am I to blame if I don’t want to create another online account? What’s the price range for these?

I really like this sentence. It nails it, i think. I’d like to think that after 40 years I’d gotten over it, my tastes have changed, moved on. But yeah, you’re probably right that I’d be dead by then too.

I hope you’re the one who bought it!

I think the Wolverine/punisher cover is the better cover when compared to the remaining stock, it’s just that I’m not convinced that the original buyer, whomever that might be, paid less than $1500 for it. In other words, there wasn’t much, if any, appreciation on that, or as someone hoped.

The layout is nicely designed (CLink even called it “museum quality”) but at the end of the day, no Punisher skull or full-figure Wolverine, I guess.

Well, for you 90s kids: I was watching the Joe Jusko Marvel Masterpieces pretty closely. Despite being 2nd/3rd tier characters, I thought the Darkhawk was going to end between $2k-$2.5K and the Warbird, dunno, maybe just over $1k? I was surprised to see Darkhawk end at $1600 and Warbird a surprising $1,700+. What was interesting was that before the action picked up, Darkhawk was sitting at $705 and Warbird at $300. Talk about deception. Not sure why the little love for the gold standard of trading card art. End of the year fatigue? Small art? 2nd/3rd tier characters? Small art? Mister Fantastic was recently up on eBay for $3200 with no takers with relisting after relisting. Not 90s, but that Tim Bradstreet Punisher cover was up on eBay for $25K. It ended at $1700. Not even sure if that price even recouped the original cost.