NicoV

This painting is from Jota Leal. All his paintings are caricatural, I find them more funny than really interesting... except in the case of this Batman were you can really have a personal interpretation of why he is portrayed this way... Some other Batman stuff https://jotaleal.com/item.php?work=556#cnt https://jotaleal.com/item.php?work=498#cnt

"Horror! Head . . . It Off!" / Story by Al Feldstein, art by Graham Ingels in Tales from the Crypt #27 The whole 7-pages story sold on Heritage in 2002: https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/graham-ingels-original-art-for-tales-from-the-crypt-27-horror-headit-off-complete-7-page-story-ec-1952-very/a/802-6630.s

Hi everybody, I just wanted to let you know that we found a compromise with Bill that we both like, which means that all dealers from the CAF Dealer Marketplace will soon be back on ComicArtTracker. And as good news never come alone, this cooperation with CAF will allow me to index the CAF Classifieds as well. So... thank you Bill! It will take some time to put everything in place but we expect to be ready by the end of the month.

The same!

#1 page 1 sold on Heritage for $8962 on 11.2011 #1 page 5 sold on CL for $9725 on 08.2012 #1 page 6 did not sold on CL (reserve $12500) on 09.2014, and sold on Heritage for $7170 on 08.2015 #1 page 24 sold on Heritage for $8365 on 02.2012

That's really weird. What do you mean by "blocked"? Do you have an error message on your browser? Did you try with another browser?

Oh my God, did I really write "hobbit" ?!

Hi Bill, Thanks for answering and detailing your point of view! As everybody here, I consider that you did great thing for our hobbit hobby when creating CAF. I appreciate your story about the early days of how CAF started, and also the time and money it takes to manage. I'll just react to one point: The last message I received regarding this was: "I considered asking for monetary compensation along with other requirements but I don’t believe that will work out well for both of us. So I do not see this working out." It did not seem to me as if you were open to any discussion at this point, but sorry if I misunderstood. If you have another proposal for API access, I will wait for your ideas! Also, if you saw a traffic spike for dealers' sites during the CAT beta launch, I would consider that a good thing! Many users have reported here or by PM that they have already made purchases from those dealers.

Thanks for your (public or private) support. We are in a two-weeks holidays in France, so sorry if I'm not as available as usual. I would like to give my (probably biaised) opinion by answering a few posts. As usual, I hope my English won't deserve me, so please keep in mind that I'm not fluent in English and I may be clumsy sometimes. I love this catchphrase Would you consider Google (or any other search engine) as a threat to CAF? However - Google scraps CAF and dealers websites (and thus increases bandwidth) - Google displays CAF and dealers images (and thus increases bandwidth) - Google is clearly a central gathering spot for all of us... including when I want to find original art from a specific artist But you know what? Not only Bill does not block Google, but he probably does his best to ensure that CAF and dealers websites are scraped by Google bots as often as possible and that his pages are displayed as often as possible on Google search results pages. For dealers and collectors, CAT clearly only has benefits: - ComicArtTracker started because I was frustrated at trying to find relevant art for sale. Frustrated by some auction houses websites first (when you cannot even have a watch list), but also by marketplaces (where there is so many and it's not so easy to only check for new art, if you don't come on a regular basis) and a lot of dealers websites with no or limited search engine, poor unresponsive design, no notifications to avoid me coming every day and see no change... Well, you know what I mean, I'm convinced that I'm not the only one to be frustrated by all these websites. - Regarding dealers (or auction houses), any free advertising is beneficial. If you're a small fish it's even better because a lot of collectors did not even know you were there. But even well established dealers can benefit from CAT. Because a lot of them have old, old-fashion websites. Because it's easier to dig into old inventory with CAT, where dealers websites tend to focus on new art. Because a lot of french collectors don't really know how to navigate into english websites (and I could easily translate CAT in Spanish or Chinese or whatever). Because collectors don't have time to come on their website every week (CAF answered this last point for 20+ dealers with daily notifications). It's not so simple with CAF. CAF has two different activities: 1) as a community platform, CAF offers a place where people can share their original art collection, sell art with no fee,... Bill clearly did a lot for this hobby of ours, when creating CAF where nothing existed before, and greatly helped to make this hobby more visible and more accessible to all of us. This platform costs money because it takes time to develop and maintain a website, and because CAF has to pay for hosting, emails, ... Premium accounts help to pay the bill and are rewarded with extra services. But I would be really surprised if premium accounts paid for all the costs. Advertising and affiliation are other sources of income. 2) as a professional services provider, CAF offers turnkey websites to dealers (I hope "turnkey" is the right word) and deep integration with CAF, which offers added visibility. I don't know how these deals work but as a website developer I have no doubt that Bill has in mind that SEO is key and does his best to ensure that his dealers websites are as well referenced as possible on search engines. CAF also takes care of hosting (and probably benefits from scale factor on hosting costs by hosting so many websites). Dealers are happy as they don't have to manage their website by themselves (and we are talking about a long time ago where building websites was not so easy and cheap as it can be nowadays) and have a good visibility both on search engines and on the number 1 original comic art website. I don't know if they pay a fixed or or variable price, but I guess that what they pay is reasonable compared to the benefits or they would not stay. Bill won't get rich with this activity but it helps consolidate the whole stuff and all this data (original art for sale coming from dealers) is also a huge added-value to his website and increases the interest for premium accounts. I really love this idea and I consider that Bill Cox was really farseeing in building this virtuous circle. So why would CAT be considered differently than Google? Because of the bandwidth? Because CAT has features that CAF does not have? Any other reason? I don't say that CAT and CAF don't compete on anything, they definitely do. But they could also benefit from each other and I told Bill that I would be more than happy to consider any solution. 1) as a professional services provider, Bill could integrate CAT to his offer, as he probably considers SEO (search engine optimization) as part of the deal. We could work together to reduce CAT footprint on CAF servers (CAT could load less pages daily than any real collector wandering on dealers websites, if we work on a way to exchange information). Bill could tell his dealers that CAT is free for them only because they already pay for the bandwidth through their deal with CAF (which is truth). We could work on having lighter images for CAT, to reduce bandwidth. And if - even with all precautions - it still costs more than today, he could ask dealers if they are ok to pay for that. Don't get me wrong: maybe he could not for any good reason I don't have in mind... but he did not wish to discuss any option. 2) as a community platform, maybe he considers CAT as a threat for his premium accounts (Google is clearly not). But here again, we could build things differently. CAF as a source on CAT would also give extra visibility to sellers. He could consider sharing only sales from premium members on CAT, or giving CAF premium members an advantage by sharing dealers sales on CAT with a delay - I mean a few hours after they are visible on CAF / dealers websites (that's already what 2DGalleries do: premium members see sales 1 hour before other members). Sorry if I'm rude, but if these emails are the only reason why you pay for a premium account, you get it wrong. For eBay you can have it for free. For dealers websites you could easily find a browser add-on (or many websites) that will alert you as soon as something changes on the "new items" page from each dealer - not only the ones hosted by CAF. That's what I did prior to working on CAT. I offered Bill to host a copy of all dealers images on my own servers. I also offered to ask each dealer if he was ok for CAT to copy his images. Of course, ultimately it means that I would have to find a way to finance this hosting. But I don't consider this as being a good solution: I don't want to replace CAF! Nobody asks Google to pay for the extra traffic / bandwidth it generates.

Hello CAT people! Some of you may have noticed the "blocked" thumbnail that appeared on some dealer listings 1-2 weeks ago. These are dealers who have their sites hosted with Bill Cox at ComicArtFans. Bill and I have been discussing possible solutions to unblock ComicArtTracker's access to these dealers, but Bill has decided that does not fit into his business model. As you may imagine, I'm quite disappointed with this decision. But it's Bill's decision and I'll respect it. It means that ComicArtTracker is not allowed to index these websites anymore and I'll have to remove them from CAT - today if I can. So don't be surprised if you don't see any art listed on the following websites: Albert Moy, Anthony's Comic Book Art, Artdroids, Big Wow Art, BritComicsArt, Comic Art Source, Comic Book Art Gallery, Cool Lines Art, Dave Karlen, Fanfare, Felix Comic Art, Golden Age Collectibles, Got Super Powers?, Koch Comic Art, Kwan Chang, NSNart, Nick Katradis, Romitaman, Scott Eder, Splash Page, TDArt, Will's Comic Art Page. I would ask any dealers who have sites hosted with Bill to email or PM me and we can discuss your participation with ComicArtTracker. ComicArtTracker.com aims to provide exposure to your art for sale. That means more traffic driven to your site. And not just any traffic, but enthusiastic collectors looking to buy. So please take a moment to think about it. To end on a positive note, I'm happy to tell you that email notifications should be ready soon. You'll have the opportunity to receive a notification (once a day) when new art is listed matching your favorite keywords, and a reminder in the 24 hours before an auction you're tracking starts. For all websites except... well, you know. I look forward to hearing everyone's comments! Best, Nico

In a way it *is* your business because, as you stated, as a user you're part of the product. There is no product if there is no user. I can give you some hindsight on how i see this project but please keep in mind that my English is probably not good / accurate enough to say exactly what I have in mind. I hope it will make sense. I started this project because 1) I'm a collector and I was often frustrated when looking at auction houses and dealers websites / services and 2) I'm a software engineer and this kind of frustration became a challenge to me and I thought it could be fun to build something for a personal use. Initially this project was just about being able to track a few auction websites without having to keep tons of tabs open. Then I added new websites, started to consider also adding dealers (and I thought there were maybe 30-40 of them, never considered counting them before)... the wobblier the website the more fun I have trying to find a way to index it! The result (or at least what it became, as I'm far from finished) is WAAAAAY bigger than what I planned initially. And my "to do" list is also WAAAAAY bigger than what you see on CAT today. So there is no "long term plan" first because I did not foresee what ComicArtTracker would become, and second because what it is now does not require a "long term plan" yet. I don't think I'll ever get rich and be able to stop working with CAT :-D Or I would never have started this project (I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours working on CAT, there's no way it can pay me what I would have earned as a consultant). But I'm convinced that it will increase my network (friends, business, who knows?) and could offer opportunities. It already did. I also love to discuss and work with end users to enrich and develop my products. That's the way I work for 20 years. So as long as it does not cost me (too much) money and I have fun working on it, it's all good. I know that, eventually, I'll have to monetize CAT to pay for hosting. But I don't want this monetization to distort what the product could or should be. I want to focus on the product, on the value. If the value is there, I'll monetize CAT. If not, I'll lose some money but I will have learned a lot. That's ok. As a French guy I might also have a cultural problem with the idea of earning money on a personal project :-D Last but not least: as long as nobody pays for ComicArtTracker, I can stop it anytime. I don't do it for a living, I do it for fun. If there's no fun anymore... My two cents.

That's not a market I'm following, so I don't know if it happens often and if there is a strong demand for such a "linker", but for sure it would be technically really difficult to do

I don't think so. For several reasons: I don't see any really useful use for this data (except for dealers to increase prices on most wanted keywords?) it's not so easy to aggregate keywords even if it's anonymized, it would probably restrain some users to search for items / add them to their favorites

I'm looking for a few testers for email notifications. Basically to ensure that these emails display nicely on the main email readers. I already tested them on gmail.com and the gmail i¨Phone app, but if you're using another client (such as Outlook, Yahoo!, Apple Mail or AOL Mail for instance - on your computer, a smartphone or a tablet) and you have enough keywords defined in your CAT settings that are likely to match new art on a daily basis, feel free to message me your CAT username so that I activate your notifications. Of course the deal is that you give me your feedback (both on design and content of the emails, or if you receive these emails in your spam folder, or if you don't receive them at all but found new matching art on the CAT favorites page). Probably a first try this evening (Paris time). I just need 3-4 testers - so first come, first served! Thanks

You're right, and as far as I know it's a quite recent issue, only on Chrome v61... If you're using another browser please tell me which one, it could help me to fix it.

I'll probably review the whole design of items list soon. But in all cases, a thumbnail is supposed to be quite small (and even if I tried to display it bigger, for a lot of websites it would just be blurry). The hover feature is available since yesterday. But if you collect pages with a specific character, why don't you define it as a favorite keyword and let the "favorites" page help you to find relevant art? Ok if you're looking for Spiderman or Batman pages it might be a looong process before having everything sorted between discarded / tracked art. But for instance one of my favorites is Galactus and it works all alone... and will be even better with email notifications later.

Compared to previous CL Focused auctions, this one seems quite similar to the previous one but lower than the 4 before. http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-10-13 total sale: $113,983 for 703 lots ($162 on average, whatever it means) Previous ones: http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-08-02 total sale: $106,062 for 638 lots ($166 on average) http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-06-30 total sale: $81,871 for 398 lots ($205 on average) http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-06-29 total sale: $72,026 for 390 lots ($185 on average) http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-05-04 total sale: $132,166 for 606 lots ($218 on average) http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-04-06 total sale: $119,027 for 586 lots ($203 on average) But: http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-02-07 + http://comicarttracker.com/en/comiclink-auctions/2017-02-06 total sale: $160,051 for 913 lots ($175 on average)

Bad luck, there was some nice art for sale in a French auction today! If you had 1.5M€ you could have bought an Asterix cover http://comicarttracker.com/en/art-richelieu-auctions/2017-10-13 (auction results are not available yet but the two covers respectively sold for 1.15M€ and 950k€ + 25% BP)

Ok you convinced me. I'll improve it (and will make it optional) but you should have a first version right now

No they don't... at least not yet But a *LOT* of these websites (even the big ones) have images that are not optimized in weight. I'm not sure what you're calling "cached images"? Why don't you like / use the fullscreen display when clicking on a thumbnail?

Beta or not, ComicArtTracker will continue to evolve so you should always feel free to give your opinion or share any idea you could have for ComicArtTracker.com to offer a better service Regarding these thumbnails, I have two elements to take into account: the sources often use thumbnails and I take them as they are (which means that I can't choose the format and if I display them bigger than on the original website, yes they are blurry) I could systematically use the full image but pages would be painfully slow to load If you find a source where images are systematically (or often) blurry, feel free to tell me and I can try to find a solution for this specific source. A global solution would be to resize the full images and store the result on my own server to use as thumbnails. But it would require bigger servers, so not for now. In all cases, maybe it's not obvious (and I have to admit that I lack the courage and time to write an online help / FAQ page, not to mention my level of English) but... did you see that you can access a far better image by clicking on the thumbnail? Then you can navigate between images and you can also track relevant artworks (either with the buttons or with your keyword: left / right arrows to see previous / next item, T to track, D to discard and V to view on the original website) without having to come back to the list. See my answer above. I could also have a "hover" card as on Heritage or ComicConnect but it would require to load the large image... only to display it in a not-so-large format. That's why I tend to prefer the solution I chose (displaying the image full screen).

Thanks @Panelfan1 I don't have any obvious answer for your need. At least not yet. Favorites can't really work with so large and generic searches (right now CAT finds more than 13,000 covers... don't think you want to sort them out). Maybe just open the whole list of newly listed art and use the browser' search feature.

Unfortunately auction houses and dealers websites are not structured: most of them won't give any art type and some of them (Heritage, eBay or Catawiki for instance) don't even have a specific field with the artist name. You cannot organize / consolidate any set of data if they are not structured. And I can't hire several persons to tag new art the whole day. Not yet ;-) But regarding the home page "New original art" panel, why would you want them to be sorted by anything else than the date? The idea is to see the websites who listed art recently. What is your need? Can you give me a scenario of what you would like to do?

You could create an account on ComicArtTracker.com and see by yourself the 160+ artworks / a dozen splashes found when searching on Barry Kitson http://comicarttracker.com/

Thanks @BCarter27 for all these pictures and for the time you took to upload them here for us! These Adam Kubert pages are...