Kevn

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.

The Olivier Coipel poster for the Marvel Super Heros et Cie exhibit is awesome! I can't find a link to the gift shop - I'd love to see if it's available to buy without coming to the museum. Or maybe I just need to take a trip to France.

The info from the old thread is very interesting. I've looked at the ebay sellers pitch for these sericels, and I think it's rather misleading. Here's an edited version of the sales pitch on each of these. I've bolded some key words and phrases that I think are either telling, or and italicized and bolded parts that are downright misleading: <Late in 1999, Universal Studios of Central Florida began to wind #1 down a five-year investment of transforming Orlando into one of the country's leading centers for television and film production. Though in previous years production groups regularly processed material in town to avoid the high union wages of the west coast, both at Universal and MGM Studios, high players like Viacom pulled out...taking with them the syndicated likes of Sea Quest, Super Force, Swamp Thing, Super Boy...assorted Wrestling and Roller Derby programs...a live action Tarzan show... To this day, investors and producers remain in courts trying to sort out the mess. I know little of how they did things at MGM, but I worked for a number of people stationed at Universal's 22 A building...host of some twenty-two independent companies. This sericel...and others like it... are prototypes for a product intended to be sold in a number of galleries and shops. No contracts were finalized. The line art is printed on an acetate sheet...it is hand painted on the back to render the printed inks opaque. The background an original airbrush painting rendered on a quality card stock.......the final effect is the stunning 3-D quality of an original animation sericel....This art is in near mint condition and is matted in white with a cardboard backing. A plastic sleeve covering is included. The artwork viewing area is 8.5 by 11 inches. The mat is larger at 11 by 14 inches.> Those old enough to remember the heyday of Disney (and later Warner Bros.) having studio stores in shopping malls across the country, and Disney releasing their animated films on VHS and then DVDs through these stores with much fanfare, will remember sericels. They're fairly high quality digital prints on thin acetate sheets that are designed to replicate the look of actual animation production cels, and were released with printed color backgrounds. These were billed as 'limited editions' (limited to tens of thousands!) and usually gave them away as a premium with the VHS/DVD of the animated film if one ordered the film in advance (as I recall). The technology allowed these to be very cheaply produced, but they looked impressive at a glance and were popular with Disney fans. There is no hand painting on sericels (it's in the name, for god's sake - they're machine-produced serigraphs on acetate) and the backgrounds were just color prints or sometimes just a colored card (i.e., also not hand painted). Disney created them by the tens of thousands. I think the sericels in question, like the one shown by the OP, are fine for what they are, and probably look great on a wall. By the way, the image shown is taken from the Avengers #3 cover. It's a cool image. I see the seller who was apparently selling them back in 1999 is still active, and they're selling at starting bids of about $30. So I doubt this is a very valuable piece, though there may well be multiple people who want a serigraph of the Avergers #3 cover and might pay a premium. There's a quote from Local Net Plus, LLC in the 2020 thread that I agree with: "I have a theory now after seeing this information. It seems very odd that he has been selling "prototypes" for nearly 20 years. He has over 2200 feedbacks and the vast majority are regarding these cells. If you conservatively said half were cells then that would be over 1000 cells that were "prototypes". I suspect that this guy is creating all of these cells himself (or a "friend" is creating them and this guy is just the seller)." Note that the seller now has about 6.5k feedbacks, so the point is ever more true. I'm not sure, though, that this is that much of a scam. For the trouble it would take to create these sericels, that fact that he's not just cranking out the same few popular images, and the prices he's selling them for, it actually doesn't seem like bad value for the money spent. I do admire that he's actually doing stuff from the pulp era, golden age, etc. Of course, this could be a cagey decision. He's unlikely to get a cease and desist order as long as he avoids Disney images and also sticks with images from many decades ago.

Is this really an animation cel? Do you have good photos of both the front and the back the cel, without the mat. I know for Marvel Super Heroes they used actual comic production art and cel xerography to get the actual comic book images on screen (though this meant the show wasn't really animated in the usual sense), but the actual cels from the show would have thick cel vinyl paint on the back of the cel and there would not be any color gradients. That is, the Hulk should be a flat green, his pants a flat purple, etc. There should be peg holes on the bottom of the cel, and between the peg holes there should be some hand written notes indicating the sequence, scene, frame number, and whatever else would be needed so that it would be shot in the correct order. This is a cool image, but I suspect it's more of a digital print that was printed on a piece of acetate, and not an actual production cel.

Looking at the older art and the latest eBay listings, it appears clear that these are prints with pencils on top, with also some fairly crude ink hatching. You can see the graphite pencil lines on top of the inks in the older pieces, and in the newer ones they're now using what looks like conte pencils (blue, red, and white) for highlights/shadows, which gives them a legit reason to be on top of what I'm reasonably certain are printed inks. The giveaway on the newer drawings is they also used the blue pencil for the faux construction lines, and those lines are also clearly on top of the inks (and have as before no real relationship to the drawing). I will say their product has gotten better in the latest versions, and they've managed to improve the eyes especially. You could do a lot worse for $35, so I have to give them credit for producing a fairly slick product that probably pleases the majority of their customers. From this is easy to see that AI-assisted art could readily be used to create passable (and even slick/good-looking) comic books, especially in those genres where artists tend to repeat poses and body types and where the emphasis is more on fan service than interesting/surprising story telling.

Looking closely you can see the pencil 'construction lines' bear little relationship to the inked image, and appear to have been placed to be obvious. Look at the marks around the nose - they're just random scribbles that have no relationship to the inked nose. All the pencil-work appears to have been done by someone with very little artistic skill, as rapidly as possible. The hatching under the headband is almost random, and has nothing to do with the contours of the face, which an actual artist would understand. And as others noted, the irises and pupils are funky.

I appreciate the clarification of how these prices still show up on dealer's CAF sites, even when the correct status ('on hold', with no price visible) is present on the dealer's actual website. As I mentioned before, I think this is more of a feature than a bug. Yes, for some people there will be a moment of disappointment when they see art on CAF they would buy at the listed price, and when they click through to make a purchase are directed to the dealer's webpage to find that there's a deal already pending. But I think that's a small price to pay to get a clear idea of what things sold for, especially when some art drops sell out literally within minutes of becoming available and prices disappear on the dealer site. Perhaps this info is preserved in the CAF market data, which for me would be a good incentive to upgrade to a premium account.

Michael, you have to look at Felix's actual website (the link he posted, at felixcomicart.com), not his CAF page, to see what's available from his artists. I for one am glad he keeps the pages and their sales prices available on CAF, since it makes it easy to get an idea of what kinds of prices to expect when there is an art drop pending. If you do try to buy from his CAF site, and click on any of those DS:FS pages that you showed above, you'll see that none of them are actually available. I can see how it would be confusing if you didn't pay attention to the felixcomicart.com website and just looked at CAF.

Per the Felix Comic Art CAF gallery, they were $3-10k per page, with two DPSs at $10k and 15k, and a cover at $20k. https://www.comicartfans.com/comic-art-dealers/felix_comic_art.asp

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.