John E.

Wow! Jon has some great pieces! Some of those panel pages are more appealing than covers!

Or do you mean, "I have this cover. What do you think it's worth?" Unless I have good rapport with a dealer, I would never trust to ask what they think my art is valued. Too much self-interest at stake. 

47 minutes ago, Andahaion said:

I think it's very interesting that in the six weeks or so that I've been seriously shopping for my first piece of OA (after around a year of slow research) I have basically not even thought about comic books.  I've been binge listening to Felix's podcasts in the car and at my desk and have to say I'm a little freaked out by how invested I've become without even owning a page yet.  I've heard/read about this phenomenon a few times, but didn't think it'd happen to me because I love my books and I love the hunt, but there's some kind of magic elixir that has me under a spell.  I'm still hesitating pulling the trigger mainly because I'm still not sure what the hell I want.  There's a lot of good stuff available, but I don't want to buy to just buy.  I want focus and purpose.  I'm also still fumbling around the context that comes with these pages.  I may see a page that, from an artistic sense, presents very well but I find myself compelled to research the story to find out about the page and greater story arc if I'm not familiar.  This is not an issue I've faced to such a degree with my fine art endeavors.  

Pretty sure this is nothing new to most of you, but I find the need to vent somewhere.  I almost started a journal to document what is looking more and more like a transition from books to art.  What the hell?

I like your post. A lot of us, especially me, are consumed with this hobby. It only gets worse when you buy your first page. Please continue doing research and don't pull the trigger on a piece unless you're absolutely sure, especially if it's a high ticket item. Ask yourself if you're doing it for nostalgia, i.e. If you want something from your childhood, or if you are more into the aesthetics of the piece. Maybe it's a little of both. Also, I tell myself that I might lose at least 15% if I decide that the piece didn't satiate me and if I'm willing to take that loss if I sell it. Losing $15 on a $100 piece isn't the end of the world, but $150-$250 on a $1000 piece? What could I have bought with that money? That's the cost of a really nice modern page right there. I hope this is food for thought. 

I feel like I've been reading too many of these R.I.P. topics lately. Rest in peace, Mr. Sam Glanzman.

57 minutes ago, AnkurJ said:

They were all from the show. Great artist list!

Boy, do you know how to work a show!

Good luck with the sale, Hal! For what it's worth, it's a terrible cover. I've never seen anything so badly drawn. I don't think you'll regret letting this go at all. You're doing the right thing! 

I just finished the Daniel Warren Johnson segment. When it comes to art, DWJ is a BEAST; and yet, he sounds like a gentle soul, and generous, too, with that sketch offer at the end. I'm still waiting for the right DWJ piece to come along, but I'd love a commission, but they kind of sound expensive now. 

Daniel says he has a humble collection, but as the years pass and he makes more cash with steady work and art sales, and as his networks expand, he's going to have a nice collection as a result.

33 minutes ago, comix4fun said:

Yes,

That's me. They mention my screen name here a couple of times in the interview. 

Okay, cool! Looking forward to hearing your take!

1 hour ago, JadeGiant said:

He comes across like that in person as well from my experiences speaking with him at Heroes last month. Seems like a very genuinely humble guy. The comix4fun guy, well ... 

I'm not quite done with listening to the DWJ portion, but for us outsiders, is @comix4fun one of the Chrises on the roundtable?

8 minutes ago, The Shoveler said:

Sigh.  David would "compose" a wall-sized canvas in such a manner as to simply avoid drawing as many faces and feet as possible.  Or, in the case of Mademoiselle Guimard and Stanislaw Kostka Potocki, he would just draw the feet ridiculously tiny.  The Tennis Court Oath was intended to portray a contemporary event, but by the time he abandoned this neglected project, it was an unfinished historical piece.  And his Deathmate: Socrates miniseries missed multiple shipping dates.  Really the 19th century's Rob Liefeld...

 

/s

4 minutes ago, artistlost said:

What I find is strange is that the seller was Anthony Snyder. I would have thought he would have known better that to do an 3-day auction on Ebay ending Saturday afternoon

I was thinking the exact same thing. I wonder if Anthony is the one who posted this listing or someone else.

Nevertheless, I'm waiting for this conversation to move over to "(Attempted) Flip of the Day" next week.

3 minutes ago, malvin said:

Neither can I!  I would have been content at $150, as that was what I thought it was worth when I bought it.  I was already ecstatic when it was over $300 yesterday so you can imagine how I feel now after it is over and the winner paid!

Now that I know who the winner is, he loves 90's art, so all hail 90's art!

Malvin

'90s collector? Freakin' awesome! It's funny what you said about your $150.00 estimate--I thought $152.50 was going to take it home.

I can't believe the hammer price on that Shadowhawk 

On July 8, 2017 at 7:37 AM, malvin said:

Thanks, already asked Simon way back and Allred wasn't 100% sure.  Everyone seems to say that it was the statue pose so it looks like it was the reference used to create the statue.

Malvin

The image also has striking similarity to a Madman T-Shirt Mike Allred put out in 1994. I found this image in Madman Comics #3 (Dark Horse, 1994). It's already tough enough to see the details on the ad, even tougher in a lo-res pic, but some obvious differences are the background, variations on the line work, and, is that Madman's hair blowing in the wind? Maybe this is a separate drawing or the T-shirt company modified the artwork in your possession with airbrushing or something. A Madman trading card set was also released in 1993, so depending on when the original artwork was created, I don't see why this image wouldn't have been included. I've never seen all the cards in the set so I couldn't tell ya. Hope this helps.

2 hours ago, drewincanada said:

Of the two pages I've located from the book I'm trying to complete, the owner of one said that I would have first dibs on it when he decides to sell it (correct Glen?  ) and the owner of the other said that he would put a note on it asking that either his widow or his estate offers it to me after he dies. 

So essentially, "over my dead body."

2 hours ago, Flambit said:

No worries!  I understood what you meant - I can totally dig it!  

In fact, I probably have some of the very worst instincts of anyone on this board.  I’ve been a fanatic comic person since I was 6 or 7, and involved in the convention life since I was 12 or 13 - and I’m old now.  I know we all have our regrets, but here’s a short list of my colossal mistakes I recall actually passing on (not stuff I saw, mind you, but stuff I was going to actually pull the trigger on but couldn’t because I couldn’t raise the money):

1987 - I don’t ever recall seeing those Dark Knight pages at Scott’s table, but I do recall seeing the table - so I won’t beat myself up about that one…. the only thing I DO recall is the Welcome to Smallville Superboy Miller cover, but I thought it was really expensive.  I did debate it, but don’t recall at all now what it went for…

1999-2000 - I swear I saw the Thor #126 cover (Thor/Herc grappling) for 10k online somewhere and passed on it, knowing it was just an insane cover image.  That one is almost like a fever dream - did I actually see it?  Just couldn’t raise the money.  Also, 2 different Frazetta Ghost Rider covers for 10k each.  A handful of Byrne WCA covers, but I recall they were pretty aggressively priced.

2003 or so - Captain America covers 197 and 199: eBay, both sold for 5k (really sting to this day because that’s a particular nostalgic favorite of mine; probably if I could go back in time for just one thing on this list, just out of my love for that run, I’d take those!).  An incredible Kirby Sandman cover sold for 5k as well around the same time - failed to raise money for all. 

2003 at SDCC: Black Panther 7 cover (3k) and Watchmen Ozy “I did it” page (I want to say it was $1800, but could have been as much as 3k).  Was out of work, couldn’t come up with the $

2003 - Jaime Hernandez gave me his for sale art list.  He must have had 10 different covers on there.  With the exception of one of the Death of Speedy covers, I don’t think one was over $600-700.  I did the math once and realized I could have had 8 or 9 covers for under 5k.  Not to mention the dozens upon dozens of panel pages and splashes. 

2007 - on caf, I saw a couple of great Bolland/Morrison Animal Man covers for 2500 (I thought, “No, too expensive” haha) and a couple of Byrne WCA covers for 3k that I just couldn’t pull the trigger on.  I loved both runs, so that hurt.  

2008 - FF #100 on Heritage in 2008 for around 50k - I was trying to raise the money but couldn’t.  I’d honestly love to see what that would flip for now because the image is so unbelievable.   

And my future mistake: I’ll put out there that I have been going back and forth, back and forth about buying one of those complete Paper Girls books from Felix.  I honestly think that’s a deal right there, I’m just tapped out.  If only there art from the Saga books available..!!!  That would be a no-brainer for sure!

Thanks for sharing again. It sounds like you tried to raise money for these opportunities and just couldn't. You can't be blamed for that. I'm a budget collector, so when I see something for $2500, I think, "That's do-able." but the reality is, that it isn't for me. I wish I could've purchased that G.I. Joe variant cover by Paul Pope recently offered by Felix for $2500, but couldn't. Or the Knightfall cover that Sam Kieth did that Albert Moy had sitting on his site for $2750 for the longest time. When you can't, you can't. You can't buy everything. Besides, even if you raised $50K+ to buy that FF 100 cover, can you imagine all the bargain comic art you'd have to give up after your purchase for years to come? That anecdote reminds me of the Will Gabri-El's story of having the $50K to buy the Avengers 50 cover, but just couldn't justify it with a new family. Or if you missed Felix's special edition Albert Moy podcast, you would've heard Albert lament that a Wrightson Swamp Thing cover sold for "only" $50K. It was one of his favorites but he didn't bother to bid because of debt. Albert's story really put things into perspective for me.

I have other regrets, but those are small potatoes. I find, though, that we talk about regrets, but we never talk about the bullets we've dodged--those impulse buys we resisted that turned out to be good decisions. And hey, we have to give ourselves credit for opportunities we didn't squander!

Just to keep it vaguely on topic, I've recently been losing money left and right on my sketch cover collection. But what little money I've been able to keep is going to bigger and better things. 

49 minutes ago, Flambit said:

I'm not complaining at all, I'm just shocked.  I picked up a decent Byrne Alpha Flight cover I'd always loved about 8 years ago for about 6k.  Last year I had a really nice conversation with a very cool collector who offered me what I thought was an astonishing amount of money in trade for it.  I had no idea it was worth what it was because they generally sat between 5-10k for years.  And my point about the Namor piece isn't that I thought it they were particularly expensive in general, it's that I thought 4k was outrageous for what essentially is no original line art, only washes over a copy.  I actually think 3.8k is completely fair for that other Namor cover, given the buyer got all the OA included; in fact, I would say that OA Namor cover at under 4k is the upper end of reasonable.  

But, I also agree with chasing stuff that doesn't pan out: in the late 80's I thought for sure Kevin Maguire could be the next John Byrne based on how hot his JL series was.  Nope.  I turned down a Kirby Eternals cover for a lesser JL cover (both were $250 - whoops!).  I wasn't speculating, because I LOVED that JL run, and I still do, but in terms of value, I definitely made a poor choice.  I also would have thought Rich Buckler would have taken off given how prolific and hot he was in the 70's/80's.  Nope, even with Nostalgia as a driving factor, you can still find affordable Buckler pieces all over the place.   At the same time, I turned down I don't know how many great Preacher pages, and even, on two occasions, two complete (admittedly lesser) issues (one was the one with Jesse's dad in Nam where the main cast is barely featured, one was Jessie driving on the road listening to the radio the entire issue).  I guess it comes down to correctly speculating, but we all tend to buy what we love, don't we?  

Sorry--I lose track of who said what in these threads and the "complain'" was me pointing in the general direction and not at you.  That said I agree with you entirely, in that it's a head scratcher why the production art sold for so much. 

Thanks for sharing that JL/Eternals story. Sometimes it seems like everyone bats .1000 and anecdotes like that keep it grounded.  It's just too hard (impossible) to predict which artists have staying power 20-30 years from now. And let's not even bring up those artists that never got their due. 

3 hours ago, SquareChaos said:

I've bought a few pieces from Felix, and he does sell in that range... well, normally. As an outlier, Tradd Moore recently did some work on Venom #150 and those pages went for up to $3000. He has a few other artists that get priced outside of that normal $150 - $500 range as well, but for the most part, the range is reasonable and can be affordable.

In general, I agree with your advice about getting there first, though from personal experience it does seem to me that the brand new modern art scene, like the brand new modern comic collecting scene, can explode very quickly and then go splat with next to no warning... books will blow up, and then fall away to a point where the masses just don't seem to care anymore. So if you have patience, if you don't feel comfortable rushing in to beat the crowd, you can often get a second chance relatively soon. Note that your second chance probably won't occur for the very best, top tier pieces, but you will still see very strong modern pieces suddenly show up at auction when the people who did rush in to beat the crowd at all costs need to drop some of their pages in order to finance that next chase. 

As an example, I recently bought a half splash at auction for around $400. Not quite a year prior, that same page was offered to me in a private deal at $1500, however, that price is outside of my comfort zone on a page that still has wet ink.... even if I do love it  That was a pretty quick turn around, I'm thrilled to own it, and I don't care that it "lost value" since I have no intentions of ever getting rid of it. With a volatile market, sometimes patience pays off, but really every strategy has some element of a gamble to it.

 

I so agree with you with what you wrote in the second paragraph. A lot of indie titles seem to go through this; one month they're hot, the next they're cold. This is pretty risky when speculating and flipping. It's probably "safer" to buy because of the artist and the quality of the page than the title. Kind of like get that artist while he's cheap.

I didn't read Byrne Wonder Woman--was that volume 1? If so, not sure why anyone would pass on volume 1 legacy. But then again, if you were chasing large art SA and actually got something good, then it was worth the sacrifice. I'd rather have that than Byrne. You can't buy it all anyway. But like Voudou says, you had 10+ years to buy cheap Bryne Namor, so no complaining'! 

1 hour ago, Panelfan1 said:

I have noticed this too.  makes me wonder If I should do the same? Is there a proper etiquette?

I leave comments for art that elicits some sort of response from me. I've noticed that often times those owners will leave a comment on one of my pieces. I don't expect them to reciprocate, but it sure is nice--especially on pieces that get viewed a lot but never get commented on. I'm not looking for "pats in the back," but I'm interested to know what draws people to click on the art. Anyway, when a stranger comments on one my pieces, I'll browse his gallery only to find that we have the same collecting interest. Thus, one or more of his pieces elicits some sort of response from me. That might be what's happening. 

The music culture is at the bottom of my interests so I'm the last person on Earth that should chime in on the "death of the guitar," but yeah, coming of age in the 1990s, there weren't "guitar heroes." When it came to "rock" it was about grunge and wounded vocals (I listened to Pearl Jam and Nirvana). The guitar wasn't a focal point. Then there was the popularity and the rise of gangsta rap and hip hop, with the latter remaining very popular. No guitar there. But y'know, back to the case at hand, I'm sure the eradication of music courses in public schools have nothing to do with that either. Again, back in the '90s, the only thing available related to music was marching band and brass instruments. Bringing it back to OA, I'm still convinced by Gene's argument that OA has maybe a good 15 years before the hobby shrivels.

If I may finally chime in here... I acquired a few Wonder Woman sketches and sold them 8 months before the film's release at the prices I was asking for and relatively quickly too. That hardly ever happens on eBay! Was that because of the movie? Maybe. I wish I could survey the buyers. But if anything, there's a market for good Wonder Woman art, and movie or not, the demand is there.

I'm glad I decided to sell before the movie because as I predicted there was an uptick of Wonder Woman art on the market, which meant more competition. Hardly anything surfaced eight months prior.

That Eduardo Barretto cover is an interesting sale. I think it's a fun cover and as mentioned previously, Barretto is experiencing a positive reappraisal much like Norm Breyfogle. Barretto worked on many popular properties and if you're priced out good copper age Batman, for example, Barretto is definitely a good value right now. To me, I think the unexpected price was the result of an available Wonder Woman cover, period. I could be wrong, but I never see WW covers pop up.

Does a screen presence increase the value of all art? Not all of it. I'm sincerely asking here: Did the CW shows for ARROW, SUPERGIRL, and LEGENDS OF TOMORROW increase the demand or the price of Green Arrow art, etc.? To me it hasn't, but I'm opened to be corrected. I will say that a Firestorm cover popped up on Will Gabri-El's site and it sold pretty quickly. To me, properties like Wonder Woman already have a built-in market; collectors are going to buy WW no matter what, and the better the image, the artist, the older and harder-to-find the art is, the more it's going to cost someone. 

On June 16, 2017 at 10:36 AM, SquareChaos said:

Every hobby I've ever been a part of has attached some form of social stigma to habitual flippers. People that just dabble in flippery will rarely see a reputation hit.

I just listened to a segment on NPR's Marketplace on the whiskey black market. Apparently one can buy certain premium whiskies at a store for about $100 and, according to a flipper they interviewed, one can sell sell it between $1200-$2500, usually through furtive Facebook groups since you can't sell liquor without a license. It got to a point where one frustrated retailer would sell a bottle to a customer on a "gentleman's agreement" handshake that the customer wasn't going to flip the bottle. On top of that, the retailer would make them break the seal in front of him. Geez.

A flip or not, I think 99.5 percent of the art on eBay is marked up. Even at its most innocuous, the mark-up is to cover fees to try to at least get one's money back. 

I had no luck searching via artist name. Funny that a lot of you here share the same sentiment I have about ComicConnect--not a place to go to for OA, frustrating to navigate. I thought it was just me being a noob afraid to get out of his comfort zone. I tried looking for stuff the other week and I couldn't find anything that wasn't in Jon Berk's collection.

Sorry--sometimes I check the Marketplace first and I didn't see this post. A move like this from a long-time collector like yourself is a reality check about completing a book. I know we've discussed this topic in the recent past, but if I ever seek this type of endeavor on a "nostalgia" book, my mindset can't be, "I'm trying to put that book back together," it has to be more like, "I collect pages from that issue."

Again, I wish you luck in finding examples from your new want list. 

2 hours ago, Nexus said:

Right, that's what I understood, too.

Which is great news to those still looking to get Kirby, Romita Sr, Buscema, et al. But again, sorry to you guys trying to get YOUNGBLOOD.

 

I can't tell if you wrote that with a straight face or tongue-in-cheek but that sentence is