Kevn

I thought the name sounded familiar, and just looked at my tattered hand-written spreadsheet of original art purchases and it turns out I bought my first piece of OA from Roger, a George Roussos page from one of the EC sci-fi books. I recall that this was an impulse purchase - what I wanted was a page of Kurtzman Frontline Combat, but those were out of reach, and this was one of the first EC art pages I'd seen being sold individually. The price of the piece was low enough that I went for it, and I remember being put off when it arrived because the blue pencils were some prominent. Haha, what a noob. The good thing about the transaction was it went off flawlessly, and gave me the confidence to buy more art. I quickly started picking up Marvel pages I really liked, and so this piece went to the back of the portfolio and I've never even scanned it. Actually, I'm not even sure I still have it. Anyway, looking back this it was one more instance where I could have used an OA buying opportunity to actually make a connection in the collector community, but I was too shy.

I think you make some great points, but one thing that bothers me about your Wiacek X-Men portrait is that it is 'signed' by both Wiacek and Smith, and the Smith signature is very much in his authentic signing style. Yes, there are dates with the signatures, but to me having the piece apparently signed by someone who didn't touch the page is potentially misleading. I've seen artists sign such pieces with something like "Wiacek '16" and, immediately below write "after Paul Smith '97" without imitating the original artist's signature. An artist's signature is the gold standard for provenance, and imitating it could confuse someone down the road, or be used by an unscrupulous seller.

I've seen a lot of recommendations for https://www.vonhawklabs.com/about-alexandra-vonhawk.html by people whose opinions I respect. I've looked into her services and it appears she is much more focused on conservation rather than restoration. I believe if you send her high quality scans of both sides of the art she can give you a good idea if she can do anything about the fold wrinkles, whether it looks like it would benefit from cleaning, etc. It can't hurt to query her.

Can't imagine it would hurt, and it might help if you somehow had more humidity than expected wherever they're stored. I've had the idea that large vacuum seal storage bags, the kind you use for packing away bulky bedspreads and towels, might be useful for sealing up portfolios in a dry, airtight condition. I can't think of why this would be harmful to OA, and it seems like it could be a useful option. Plus you could wrap the portfolios in a couple of towels, so to a thief it would look like you had a few sealed bags of towels that would have no value.

Curious who did these prelims. I like them a lot, but they look like John Romita rough drawings. Is the "Marie Severin" written on them to indicate that she was to do the finished covers, or were her rough work much more dynamic and balanced than her finished work?

My assumption is that if they were vintage (i.e., part of the original production process) it would read "...logo, masthead text, and cover caption box are original paste-ups affixed to the board." I think the words "high-quality reproduction" indicates pretty clearly they're modern, at least more modern than the art. My question would be, how are they affixed? Edit - Bronty beat me to it.

I agree about the cover. I'm not the biggest Miller fan, but that DD 190 cover is very impressive, and I also was surprised it didn't go higher. Maybe it's because the cover is in layers, and the originals are difficult to display?

I suspect there may be an "original" somewhere, but it'll be a unsightly kludge of multiple stats, white out, and rubber cement, with almost no actual "original art"! And with a value probably 1-2% of the value of what just sold.

No insight beyond what I can deduce from the Heritage scan and the original cover image. It looks like the original art was photostatically reduced by about 30%, with the resulting photostat mounted on a blank 10x15 board and additional bg inked in to add the tip of the surfboard, more building on the left and right, a little more ground at the bottom, and more Medusa hair as needed. A lot of the bg sky was inked black, requiring a simplification of the 'swoosh' lines off the back of the surfboard. The signatures were also whited out and inked over, then title and other stats added. Then the whole thing was photographically reduced the standard amount for printing as a cover. I'm guessing that this was done because if the title and other stats were put on the original 10x15 board (i.e., what was sold in the auction), it would have covered up most of the SS and part of the thing. It simply wouldn't have worked. As for this now not completely matching the published cover, to my eyes, this makes the cover OA more desirable. You get a larger image of what really matters (a great, well rendered action scene!), with no ugly stats and clumsy corrections. And the signatures are revealed. If there had been significant changes to the characters, as is often seen in covers, I might feel differently, but here the figures are identical.

Sorry to be off topic, but I know people here have wide collecting interests. My sister is asking for the best place to sell a collection of rare books, first editions, etc. An elderly neighbor of hers has asked for help liquidating her collection, and my sister doesn't have time or expertise to directly help, and lives in a city with no rare book dealers. I'm guessing Heritage is a reasonable option to at least give a rough appraisal and actually sell any books that really are valuable, but wasn't sure if other auction houses are better for books.

Thanks for sharing your CAF page. It looks to me like you're doing just fine in your collecting - that's a really nice set of pages! I like how you have a theme/preference, and are working it well. I also like that you're focused on panel pages, as I mostly have been. I tend to prefer those for a variety of reasons, especially when the pages are well chosen so they stand alone nicely, as your pages do. One thought is that you can stretch your budget to add artists who have done Batman but who tend to be more expensive, rather than buying more expensive pages by artists you already have. I've tended in the opposite direction, being more artist-driven than character driven, but Batman is a great character for bringing out the best in a variety of artists, no matter their style. Check out the Batman Dark Age book that just came out. I'm a big Allred fan and am enjoying his take.

A basement is the last place I'd put OA (or anything vulnerable to moisture/mold). I've known of several people who had their basements flood (my mother's basement twice flooded to the rafters), and lots of basements are just generally dank. Mold is a much bigger threat to OA than theft. Attics have the opposite problem, poor temperature control and often become ovens in warm weather. I've kept my OA in my house during renovations several times. I have other valuable things and electronics, much of which would be a much bigger target for theft by workers, or would be more vulnerable to damage. I just took reasonable precautions. Unless the renovation involves gutting the house, I would just move the things wanted to protect to a room that wasn't affected by the renovation, and lock it in a closet. A home security camera setup with live feed is also pretty easy and cheap to set up, so you can keep an eye on things during the day while out of the house (during my renovations I was always living in the house). If you're doing something so extensive that you have to move out for a while, then yes, I'd move the art to wherever I was stying in the interim. Also, my family and I have used temp/humidity controlled self storage places for years without issue. I think the key is that when you put stuff in there, don't let it be obvious that it's really valuable stuff, and you check out the crime history at different facilities before you rent. Most storage units are full of stuff with minimal resale value, and are low value/high risk targets for thieves. in the rare cases where units are broken into, my impression is that it's usually because the thieves had insider knowledge of which units to target.

Ultimately you need to figure out what really floats your boat, and act accordingly. What I mean is, what does your gut tell you when you're looking at OA? I think we're all very different in what we want from, and get out of, this hobby/obsession. Are you bringing a comic collector mentality to buying OA? Are you driven by nostalgia for what you were excited by as a kid? Or do you love these pages as unique and magical objects, records of a crazy process to somehow, sometimes, transmogrifies into meaningful entertainment and even a kind of art? For me it's all about the art, and the feeling I get when I look at that specific piece. Only certain artists, and only certain pages from those artists, gives me that tingle and buzz that drives me to purchase. I couldn't care less which artists/titles/characters are hot or popular, I have relatively little 'mimetic desire' and rarely suffer from FOMO. So 'popular' doesn't nudge me. I see lots of art that I can admire, that I can respect, and that I might strongly suspect will appreciate significantly, but I have no desire to own it. Looking back (I started collecting in the '80s), I wish I had been more omnivorous, since I would now have a lot of valuable art that I don't love, but that I could trade for pieces that are now much more expensive than I'm willing to go. But that ship has sailed, and I've still ended up with a bunch of pages that still excite me when I look at them. By all means stretch yourself and try buying a page or two that are more expensive, but I recommend doing that from passion, and not from calculated reason. Buy the pages with action/panels/poses/expressions/linework/composition/whatever that you find thrilling. Then see how you feel a few weeks later, and if you don't have any regrets then rinse and repeat.

Any recommendations for Europe, and the Netherlands specifically?

I think it's typical that when demand > supply, prices increase (which I think has been the case for Sandman art in the recent past). This market 'price signal' is usually followed by an increased supply (assuming an increased supply exists or can be produced, and we know there is always increased supply of OA, tucked away in collections, though for many artists/characters/books this is fairly limited). If the increased supply gluts the market (supply >> demand), prices will decrease. If increased supply roughly meets the increased demand, then price increases will be suppressed, but prices won't necessarily decrease (i.e., the 'market is cleared'). Down the road, if new buyers create increased demand, so that demand again is greater than supply, prices will tick upwards again. You can define all this as 'artificial' but I think it's more a basic free market mechanisms.