NicoV

2 hours ago, vodou said:

Ha ha. And now we've entered CAT Phase II - The Marketing Angle, where NicoV bombs every auction thread with his (haven't found an exception yet) much more consolidated and (especially lcd/average) user-friendly auction house search/results/links.

I'm eager to enter CAT Phase III - The Viral Propagation... when people will do it for me 

Here they are!

Will you find the "D.U.C.K." (Dedicated to Unca Carl from Keno) acronym hidden in this page from Don Rosa?

Direct links to these pages in my gallery, if you want to see more detailed images, published versions of the pages (it's sometimes funny to see how it differs from one country to another),... and descriptions if you speak French 

http://2dg.me/15xb | http://2dg.me/8ky | http://2dg.me/8ko | http://2dg.me/8kn | http://2dg.me/15vb | http://2dg.me/ajo

11 hours ago, vodou said:

CC should definitely pass a piece of the action over to NicoV if number of bidders and bids this time considerably increases on non-WD offerings.

Sounds definitely like a GREAT idea 

And if you want to have a quick look to all original art available in this auction : 

http://comicarttracker.com/en/hakes-auctions/2017-11-16 

1 hour ago, Alessio Quaresima said:

There are some Disney fans and collectors???

I'd like to see some Disney original arts!

Share what you have, please

What do you call "Disney original art"? Any original art based on Disney universe? Disney animated art?

I have some art from Don Rosa, Daan Jippes and Disney studios (and there's also a lot of Italian artists who worked on Donald and Mickey stories), do they fit this category?

7 hours ago, FSF said:

BTW, who is the artist and what other works have they done?  I'd very much consider buying this painter's works but not this one.

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

On 03/11/2017 at 7:23 AM, Brian Peck said:

While I would love a Death of Captain Marvel by Starlin the use of markers and the fading has kept me from going after some.

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

28 minutes ago, PhilipB2k17 said:

 I'm blocked from accessing all of the dealers who display at CAF on my home wifi network too.

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:

16 hours ago, Bill Cox said:

While I told him I did not think it would work well for either of us, I did suggest that paying for access to my network with other restrictions was the best I could come up with. He did not pursue that suggestion, nor offer anything more. That was the end of our discussion.

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.

On 27/10/2017 at 4:03 PM, Panelfan1 said:

you need to consider comicarttracker (...)  Its kind of what uber is to cabs.

I love this catchphrase 

On 27/10/2017 at 8:07 PM, SquareChaos said:

Someone that earns some portion of their living providing an internet presence for various dealers does not want some other site scraping the content they host and becoming a 'central gathering spot' for the community. It may be good for the dealers, they may see a few more sales since the art is somewhat easier to find, but if the CAT site traffic gets large enough, it is not a far leap to start wondering what service the (suddenly) middleman is actually providing. Who knows what business model CAT may be considering down the road... just the question I previously asked in this thread.

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). 

On 27/10/2017 at 8:31 PM, Pete Marino said:

I can see it pretty easily.  Why should someone pay for the $50 annual membership, where the biggest boon is the bi-daily keyword emails, when CAT can provide that, plus more?

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.

On 27/10/2017 at 8:56 PM, Nexus said:

My guess is that one of the primary reasons CAF-hosted sites aren't being shared is bandwidth usage. I know CAF's bills are huge, certainly relative to income, and there's no clear direct benefit to CAF for another site to grab their images. Again, just my guess.

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

3 hours ago, Rick2you2 said:

Second, if you are interested in another project, have you considered a "pencil and ink" linker?

A growing number of artists don't sell inked original art (working digitally), and as for me, I generally won't buy pages which consist of just pencils. 

Perhaps there is a way in which the inkers and pencillers can scan in their work to a site and the program automatically links the two pages? It would also automatically combine what each artist wants to be paid into a single price. Then, someone could buy the inked and penciled pages as a unit.

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 

On 20/10/2017 at 4:07 AM, SquareChaos said:

@NicoV - I've wondered since you first told us about CAT whether or not you were going to consider making the (de-identified) search data you're gathering available to the community. If enough people start using your site as a portal to original art, you may be able to serve up some interesting analytics 

I don't think so. For several reasons:

1. I don't see any really useful use for this data (except for dealers to increase prices on most wanted keywords?)
2. it's not so easy to aggregate keywords
3. 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 

1 hour ago, bisquitodoom said:

The only bug I've encountered is that if you search for something too broad (2000+ results) it executes the full search and shows the first few results, but then it crashes the site and you have to close out the browser.  Not that I plan on searching for that general of a term much, but it can make it painful if you accidentally hit enter at the wrong place. 

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.

26 minutes ago, Rick2you2 said:

Is there some way to make the thumbnails slightly bigger? I collect by the character, and it can be hard to spot the characters on small thumbnails. 

Were you saying that you plan to have a hover feature which expands the thumbnail to a larger size if we keep our cursor over it? If not, is that doable?

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)

4 hours ago, Twanj said:

It's just a bit cumbersome & interrupts the flow. You can see enough at that intermediate size to know if it's worth investigating more or outright discarding. I wish Comic Link had that feature, it saves a lot of time when you're going through a whole auction listing. To not have to open more tabs is better.

Fullscreen is just a bit too slow in that it involves too many clicks & navigation.

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

Just now, Twanj said:

Could you use the cached images for thumbnails, then their larger images by URL for a "hover" card? Or do they prevent you from referencing the images on their servers remotely? 

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?