Kevn

It looks like his framing was done by someone who does museum-quality work. Looks good to me, and I have faith that it's not going to damage the art unless there's a big window in that room.

I can see why dealers might do that. One, those pieces on the wall are often really amazing, and lend a cachet to the dealer's entire stock, and further signal that the dealer is a major player. Two, at those price points, you only need to sell a small percentage of the 'wall art' at a show to do well. And three, there's the fear of leaving money on the table. Those are often the kinds of pieces that in an auction might go for double the reasonable estimates, and what dealer wants to potentially let a buyer get a great bargain? I think this phenomenon is why in all my years of going to SDCC and other conventions I rarely even asked about any of the wall art, much less tried to buy a piece. The prices usually seemed so high that even if I could negotiate a discount it would still be more than I was willing to pay. As a lone buyer, you never know if you're the one-in-a-thousand sucker. In an auction, you know there's at least one other person as crazy or clueless as you are, and that urges you to go higher. At a con, when you keep passing the dealer's booth and you see customers coming and going, and those pieces aren't moving, you assume those pieces must indeed be overpriced.

I haven't attended SDCC in a while and back in the day I would have loved to have seen some OA panels. I think having auction house reps, comic shop owners, and people who are also artist reps or dealers is not so useful for potential new collectors. It would be kind of like having a couple of auto manufacturer's reps and a couple of used car salesman talk to people wondering if buy their first car is a good idea or if they should replace their old car. Why not do a panel where Bill Cox is the moderator, and there are 4-5 collectors with, as Brian says, each with a different general focus. It's fine of some of those collectors do a lot of buying and selling as they manage their collection, but people with a vested interest in profiting from the hobby are going to have fundamentally different messages than what budding collectors need. And I'm a huge believer in the free market, and love that there are so many OA dealers, and auction houses, and artists' reps. Hell, let them have their own panel where they can tell funny stories about all the wacky collectors they've had to deal with! I remember the questions I had as I dipped my toes into this world back in 1980. Then the stakes were lower - no one had much to gain by ripping me off or dramatically misleading me when I was buying pages for $20-50 each. But still, I had so many questions, and people running auction sites wouldn't have been the ones to answer them. I think the ideal for a panel like that would be for someone to give a well rehearsed 5-8 minutes summary description of the art and the hobby, then each panelist gets 5 minutes to clarify or add to that summary, and then open the floor to questions that would be answered by collectors on the panel. As I think about it, Bill would be especially great as a moderator because he's interviewed a ton of collectors and could pull together a great, balanced panel of collectors who are also thoughtful about the hobby. Hey, maybe that's a good project for Comic Art Live. Solicit a list of newbie collector questions and do a 2.5 hour show with Bill and 4-5 collectors who have all seen the list of questions and are prepared to make thoughtful, concise responses. Then the show would be available to the entire world for years to come. (Someone is probably going to tell me that Bill has done this, and if he has, I'd love to get the link.)

And to further clarify, that's per heir. So spread it out between a spouse and two children, for example, and there are no estate taxes till you hit $40 million. Sorry for any confusion, this is incorrect.

If you look at the broader housing market, and look at it over many decades, it becomes clear that houses are not an investment but a store of wealth, and a very time consuming store of wealth. When you factor in the costs of maintenance, property taxes, remodeling costs, insurance, mortgage expenses, and the substantial transaction costs of both buying and later selling, the net cash out is usually not far off the rate of inflation, and often not even that good. When you factor in the hundreds/thousands of hours the average homeowner does on their homes (compared to the renters), and how illiquid homes are, it really doesn't make sense to consider it at an investment, it's more like a job or, if you enjoy that, a passion project. And all of that doesn't touch of the huge cost (financial, time-wise, and emotional) a putting a home on the market, finding a new home, fixing up that home, moving, settling in, changing schools/commutes, etc., etc. I've been though 5 or 6 cycles of buying/selling a home. It's miserable and exhausting, and each time I think "we're not doing that again for a looong time!" Looking at the big picture it's been a lousy financial investment when the actual costs are appropriately factored in. Circling back to the discussion of 2007-2008, what I remember regarding housing is that asking prices went down a modest amount, and the rapid growth in housing prices stalled, but mostly the inventory of available houses dried up. People stopped buying or selling. There were a lot of foreclosures because thousands of people who should never have qualified for a home loan (i.e., subprime mortgages) were upside-down on their loans because they'd literally paid zero or a trivial amount as part of a down payment. If you "paid" $350,000 for a house by getting a mortgage for $340,000 and contributing $10k yourself, and now you owe $340,000 on a house that has a FMV of, say, $280-300k, then you may have a big incentive to walk away. Folks taking out subprime mortgages were always high risk, and before the financial crisis the default rate on these loans was, as I recall, around 5%. During the crisis this increased about 4-fold. What goes unsaid in looking back at this time is that there were a lot of people using subprime mortgages to buy second and third homes, with the plan to hold them for a year or two and flip them for a fast 20% profit. I remember thinking in 2008 that maybe I should consider scooping up one of these defaulted homes at a bank sale. The funny thing is that these defaulted homes didn't really tank the general market that much. There were a lot of shady people involved in mortgage banking and real estate who swooped in and bought up these defaulted homes from clueless banks that just wanted them off their books. Those people either turned them into rentals or held them for a bit before putting them back on the market at prices far above what they'd paid the bank. It was mysteriously difficult to get involved in these bank foreclosure sales, to the point that the LA Times had a long investigative report trying to figure out who was buying these homes and why the banks were practically giving them away. At the time it seemed like a modern version of Chinatown. Anyway, as Felix recalls, there was a huge amount of angst, and fears that the entire economy would be broken. In retrospect it was that big a deal for the vast majority of people, especially in terms of home values and investment values and OA values.

My favorite experience with market timing comes from around late 2008. A couple of years before I had recently read William Bernstein's 'Four Pillars of Investing' book and consolidated all my savings and investments into Vanguard's total stock market fund. I'd also bought a house in LA house around 2004 and seen the value more than double in that time. Then the crash hit. I was talking with a friend who came from a monied family, and who had a lot of money he'd invested. I told him my Vanguard account had dropped by close to 40%, but I'd reacted as per Bernstein's advice and put what extra money I could into that account ("buy when there's blood in the streets"). He laughed at me like I was an insufficiently_thoughtful_person and said he'd known a crash was coming and had pulled all his money out of the stock market. "When did you do that?" I asked. "Oh, I'd seen it coming for a few years. I pulled it all out in 2003." Needless to say, he'd missed out on stock gains that would have far outpaced his loses in 2007/2008. A few years later, around 2011 (when my Vanguard account was bloated from the bull market that started after the crash, and has continued), I asked him how well he'd done when he jumped back into the stock market. "Oh," he said sagely. "I still haven't. I think the stock market is broken."

This is a little vague for me. What kind of secret re-inking are you referring to, and what is the sector of the hobby? I suppose you might mean examples like the Jamie Hernandez piece above, where markers were used to for large black fill areas (I believe this is the case for some of the Preacher pages, judging from that thread that I read for the first time today)? Or do you mean there are examples of art by, say, Toth or Kane, where lots of the primary line-work are badly faded and before these are put on the market the faded markers are re-inked? I am mostly OK with the former case as long as the re-inking is done competently and is disclosed, but the latter is a huge problem.

I remember reading years ago that Will Eisner touched up and even completely redid some of his Spirit pages after their original publication. At least some of these revisions were done on the original pages and weren't to preserve the art, but to improve it. Of course there's a long history of some fine artists reworking their paintings (Degas' friend and art dealer used to literally chain Degas' paints to the wall to keep the artist from taking them back to his studio to rework). I rather doubt Eisner's revisions have dampened the value of the OA, but this is a case of the original artist making the modifications. Overall the thing I'm most comfortable with artists (like Jim Lee or Jamie Hernandez) re-inking over their faded markers with india ink. (Assuming the original artist's skills have deteriorated, then it could be a rather dicey situation). There have been a lot of good thoughts in this thread, and like most I have mixed feelings about this kind of thing. When I see OA on a browned, foxed, brittle board with faded inks and globs of dried, acidic adhesive and grey stats I feel despair, especially knowing that this degradation has happened over relatively few decades and is probably past the point of no return. It's the same for OA with heavy use of markers that are already heavily faded and are practically disappearing before one's eyes (especially if the original artist is gone or unable to match their old line). Given how much of this art was done by different artists doing the pencils and then the inks, I'm probably OK with a skilled professional inker going over faded markers, assuming the original artist isn't able to, and the OA itself has other original elements that are intact (otherwise, why not just do a full on 'recreation' on a clean sheet of paper). And of course it should be fully documented and clearly advertised. I think the bigger problem, as many have alluded to, is the lack of transparency and disclosure. An example is the Paul Pope piece being sold by the Donnelly brothers that Felix confirmed had been substantially reinked, and that Paul Pope hadn't been involved. That's seriously problematic. I think in general there is a scary amount of secrecy in this hobby, and it's not just one or two dealers or collectors. I looked into having a couple of pages conserved some years back and at the time came to the conclusion that the few people specializing in OA conservation/restoration were not necessarily using museum-quality techniques and rigor, much less sharing with each other their techniques and discoveries of what works and what doesn't. Given the staggering variety of papers, inks, markers, tapes, glues, etc. that comic artists have used over the years, it's easy to imagine that something that is safe for one page may wreck another. And that's to say nothing of what some of these techniques (like whitening) do to the longevity of the art. So we're in a double bind situation - art was produced often using inferior media, has been torn, roughly handled, exposed to moisture or too much light, and needs some kind of conservation to stabilize, but it's something of the wild west when it comes to having this work done. With so much of this art now worth tens of thousands of dollars and often far more, we have a real need for dramatically more information sharing on conservation techniques, restoration techniques and results, and calling out bad actors. In another thread that was discussion of the original Punisher cover that was advertised as coming up for auction, and then quietly pulled amidst suggestions that it was fake. If that happened in the fine art world, I can't imagine that it wouldn't have resulted in a big investigation. Here, no one knows about it unless you know the right people, and then it's just hearsay and rumors.

I'm a huge Frazetta/BWS Conan fan, though no expert on Conan OA prices. From an artistic standpoint, I think this is a weak composition with muddled execution. Many of Frazetta's and BWS's amazing Conan images use a triangular/pyramidal composition, with Conan's face at the apex, and Conan in an epic, upright, and dominating pose. The enemies, alive, wounded, or dead, become part of an artful mass, usually seen with their backs to the viewer, so that we rarely see their faces, and don't confuse the silhouette of Conan. This composition does the opposite - Conan is squatting, off to the side, and assumes little more significance than several of his enemies. The overall composition is an inverted 'V' with a wide, landscape composition - the exact opposite approach taken by FF/BWS. The wild-eyed horse head at the bottom right and the funky elephant in the far bg are particular eye catchers (i.e., distractions), and there's not much in the way of artfully spotted lights and darks to guide and focus the eye. It feels cluttered and chaotic to me. Brunner is a fine artist for stuff that's in his wheelhouse, which makes this all the more disappointing to my eye.

I remember seeing the Frazetta booth at SDCC in either the 80s or early 90s with literal scribbles going for hundreds of dollars, and anything approaching a proper rough quite a bit higher. In '91 I paid $200 for a Kaluta pencil rough (for comparison, the next day I bought a Romita Sr. S-M splash page for less). I've paid good money for scribbles and roughs from Steve Rude, Jean Giraud, Bill Tytla, and a few others, and been happy for the opportunity. Maybe it's because I've been a traditional animator, where the roughs are far more interesting (and among professionals considered far more valuable) than the cleaned-up drawings or painted cels. The scribbles and roughs are often where the real artistry and creativity are on full display. One thing that's easy to lose sight of - the fact that there is a robust market for new original art, including scribbles and roughs done on actual paper using physical media, is a major reason that so many talented artists in comics today continue working with traditional materials, including some who are young enough to have learned to work digitally from their earliest days. In animation the vast majority of character designers, viz dev artists, bg artists, story board artists, and animator work entirely digitally, even for two-dimensional animation projects. Future animation art collectors are going to have nothing but digital art to collect from the films and shows they're growing up with now, with few exceptions. Why? Because it's faster and easier and the artists have nothing to gain from working traditionally, since the studio owns all the actual art, and in most cases that physical art (if it exists) has minimal market value. I applaud any dealer providing affordable art to fans and collectors. And I applaud the artists who resist the siren song of the Cintiq. I'm happy to put a little money into their grubby ink-stained hands.

I just want to say that I appreciate the clarity and frankness about the above example of the Heroescon auction. I'm almost completely disconnected from the network of OA collectors, and this board and CAF are my primary eyes and ears on the pastime. So for me at least it can be frustrating when I read allusions to "certain dealers/artists/auction houses/collectors," just as it's frustrating when people are excessively vague in their comments and complaints (for example "OA prices are too high!" and "OA prices are collapsing" threads happening simultaneously). And I don't mean that threads like this aren't meaningful or valid, just that the sweeping generalizations about a hobby and art form that is incredibly disparate and nuanced isn't very useful.

There are good reasons why the vast majority of recent art that is sold is not sold at auctions. This goes for both fine art and comic art. There are steep transaction costs (in both time and money), there is huge pricing variability, you're operating with a tiny sales window, and the vast majority of auction buys go in with specific targets. It's a common theme here that people get auction fatigue between HA, CL, CC, Hakes, eBay, and others. As it is, lots of nice art tends to slip through the cracks, especially at the lower end. Imagine if just 20% of all new comic pages went straight to auction every month, on top of all the many thousands of older pages already being auctioned. I rarely go into a comic shop and browse any more - there's just too much product every month, and the shops I go to are so crammed that I can't even browse titles. I have to sort though boxes and stacks, even for the very latest titles. OA auctions are something of a -shoot for well established artists/characters/titles. For the majority of newer artists putting out contemporary work, it would be a financial bloodbath.

This is pretty much exactly what I mean by markets being self correcting. I don't think you can "create FOMO" by raising prices, else every retailer in every market would be doing exactly that. You describe a situation where covers by an artist you like were somewhat over priced (i.e., a single cover selling over a 6-month period, so clearly were some degree above a "market-clearing price" or what the buyers would consider FMV), and then abruptly the prices were almost doubled. You don't mention if in that case any of those covers that had been sitting around suddenly started selling, but I'm going to guess they didn't. In the eBay example, where prices are raised significantly, the items didn't sell, and prices were subsequently adjusted downwards. You also describe covers you sold being marked up 4-5x, and then the items remain for sale for an indefinite period. This is three examples where unrealistic price increased seem to have failed. In any event, in my experience prices doubling for a certain artist's work over 4-5 year periods is not particularly unusual. A 4x increase over 3-4 years is, but that might also just reflect wishful thinking in asking prices, and not at all indicate a massive increase the actual sales prices.

Doesn't it depend entirely upon the artist in question, the title, and the quality of the image? I'm responding to this part of the original post: Just received an offer for a soon to be published cover that was 4 times what I had been paying. I was kind of shocked. It is great art, very detailed background, great perspective and a lot more work than what I had been buying. Are you basing this observation on a single cover (it sounds that way from what you wrote, but just wanted to clarify)? Was this a 4x increase from an artist you'd previously bought covers by? Is the new cover on a much higher visibility title? Does it involve much more collectible characters? Has the artist's reputation and prominence increased over the last 4-5 years? Is it a super amazing image (you indicate that it is an exceptional piece of work). Frankly, I see a 3- or 4-fold range in cover prices for most established artists, based on the title, characters, poses, etc. There are a few dealers whose artists I've been following a little bit. For the dealers who rep a variety of artists (like Felix mentioned above), I see a huge range in sales prices among the artists, for both covers and interior pages. As in, a 20-fold difference! OK, throw out the super extreme exception of Tradd Moore, and there's still a good 10-fold difference among the artists. I'm skeptical that this is a genuine trend of two doublings in price over just 4 years across the board for new art. The nice thing about open markets is that they are inevitably self-correcting. If an artist or a dealer is underpricing, people will snap up the art and increase the price to the actual FMV. If an artist or dealer overprices (or buyers try to speculate and flip art that was already at FMV), the stuff is going to sit there, sometimes for years, or it'll quietly be sold at a discount. I could easily see the example mentioned as either a dealer realizing that this artist's work was being flipped successfully, and wanted to get more of that $$ for the artist. I could also imagine the dealer deciding to make a play to push his artist into a new price category, which could easily backfire. Or it's just a reasonable price for a cover that is 4x more desirable that the covers you were seeing 4-5 years ago.

That's awesome, thank you! I'm in Amsterdam, so shipping shouldn't be too bad. I do need to plan a family European trip for later this year, so there's a possibility I'll get there, but I need to cover a lot of bases with the trip and make other family members happy, and I'm not sure that part of France will be too interesting. If you remember, please nudge me when you're about to go so I can confirm.