Michael Browning

I think it hits $20k.

Wow, someone is dumping ALL their Kitchen Sink art!

Knowing what Ross art prices cost when buying them from him, I’d say the sellers both lost quite a bit of cash on each piece. Ross art hasn’t been really hot for awhile now.

Nah, I moved on quickly, because I wanted to prove the dealer wrong. And I did, by several hundred dollars on each page. 😉

When Gene Colan couldn’t get work at Marvel and DC, which was very late in his career, he went to work for Archie. A friend of mine bought all of Gene’s original art in complete stories directly from Gene. He sold those almost 20 years ago and whoever bought them from him broke up the stories and sold them page by page. Aside from some of the older, more vintage Archie art (Lucey and Montana, in particular), Dan DeCarlo bikini covers and a few of the Dan Parent risqué covers, all other Archie art typically sells very low.

I have one other memory of how times have changed that I’ll share: Back when I first got into the hobby, I got some really nice Hulk pages by Sal Buscema and Gerry Talaoc. I think they were from Hulk 297 and 300, or somewhere around those, and I saw what Sal Hulk pages were selling for and there was a piece of art I wanted to trade for so I offered them up to one of the (then-and-now) small-time dealers in what I thought was a very lopsided-in-his-favor offer and he told me how worthless my art was and how he had owned all those pages before I got them (wasn’t true; I got them from Tom Fleming who had owned them for years and Tom even confirmed that to me). He trashed all my art in multiple and very lengthy and detailed emails and messages and told me to go back and get some real art to offer him and not to bother him anymore. He was offended that I offered him my junk art in trade for his art so he wanted to teach me a lesson and the messages I got from him just went on and on about how I needed to learn about the hobby and how to price my art. He was so nasty and it almost caused me to leave the hobby. Now that he’s forgotten all that - how awful he treated me - and because I have art that he would like to get from me, he wants to be my buddy, even inviting me to do an online show with him last year. That would be a big NO. Because I haven’t forgotten. Ah, how times have changed.

Mister Miracle. Vastly different than Miracleman and Miracle Man. And, those two auctions are ComicConnect auctions, so what did you expect?

I see you edited your comment. Maybe it was because it originally said “I’m not living in my parents’ basement NOW in a shirt stained with cheese doodles BECAUSE MY MOM WASHED IT AFTER MAKING ME TAKE IT OFF, telling myself my longboxes will make me a millionaire ANYMORE.” 😂

Wow, you’re losing a lot of credibility with statements like this.

The black strips were done o a lot f Marvel covers from that era and were used when necessary for the printing process. That one has been glued on in production and all but the M has been torn off at some point, maybe during production.

You also reinforce my $4000-$5000 estimate by showing that this page sold for $2100 in a C-link auction, which means it probably sold lower than it should have. 😉

I gave them my honest valuation of the page in my first answer. $4000-$5000. I stand by that. If a regular page goes for $2100, then a page drawn by John Buscema and featuring one of the characters he is famous for drawing during the silver age would go for significantly more, hence my $4000-$5000 estimate. The argument against my estimate is that a page from that same issue sold at ComicLink for $2100 — but that page does not have the Surfer on it and there is a Surfer tax on these pages where they always sell higher with him on there. Especially when it’s the Surfer drawn by John Buscema. Ron, absolutely with all due respect, you’ve been around as long as I have and you should know how high Surfer pages sell. I sold a Beavis and Butthead page with a Ron Lim Silver Surfer on it four years ago for $1800, so I know a 1980s, Avengers volume 1 page drawn by John Buscema would definitely sell for a LOT more than $1800 and that would put it right in the range of my estimate. My statements about a dealer putting it up for sale for five figures is not the estimate, it’s how high I believe they would price it on their websites.

I think it could definitely go as low as $2000 (but I doubt it would go as low as $1500), but I think the ceiling is $3500. Tiny Darkseid and the group shot of the gods doesn’t really bring the big bucks.

Is he wanting you to sell it? I’m a bit confused as to what you’re wanting advice on. If you’re asking how much the page is worth, probably about $2500-$3500. It’s a bit heavy on the Perez inks and there’s not a lot of Byrne left — and it’s a page without Superman and Wonder Woman on it.

Apples and oranges. Again, show me results of where a John Buscema Silver Surfer page sold for that low. When the Surfer is on the page and drawn by John Buscema, that changes the page entirely and, no, it is not the same as all other late John Buscema Avengers pages. Every dealer would put that page on their site at above $8000, not just the Donnelly brothers. Trust me on that.

Auction results with John Buscema drawing Silver Surfer? Yeah, not sure what auction results you're looking at, but check the HA results from the past few years and see what John Buscema Silver Surfer art sells for. Also, Avengers 266 pages haven't sold at auction since 2018 and that one didn't have the Surfer on it. I probably should have mentioned that Silver Surfer on a page brings a Surfer tax that raises the prices considerably.

Both are very nice pieces of art. A dealer would price the Aparo around $7500-$8000 and maybe even $10,000, based solely on it being a vintage cover by Aparo. A legitimate price would probably be around $5500, in my honest opinion. Charlton covers - even those by Ditko - don't usually sell over $6500-$8500 as they have been very stagnant for more than a decade without much growth at all and those that are on dealers' sites ALWAYS sit for YEARS. The Avengers 266 page is a John Buscema Silver Surfer page with the members of the FF and Avengers in that last panel (and they're in the first panel, though very tiny), so I think it would hit around $4000-5000, but could go as high as $8500 at auction. A dealer would price it at $12,000-$15,000 for sure. The biggest drawback is that the Surfer is whining and not in action, but, then again, maybe for Surfer fans, that is a selling point. It also doesn't help that the majority of the art on that page is by Tom Palmer and not by John Buscema, since he was doing very light pencils/layouts at the time and Palmer was doing the heavy lifting to make it look like Buscema. That fact could drag it down a bit, but probably not too much.

I don't see any DeCarlo art in the pics at all.

Back in the mid-1990s, I started out looking at this new thing called the internet when I was a sports editor at a local newspaper and was fascinated that there were people that sold original art. I did a Yahoo search and found the comicart-l Yahoo group first, then a site called Dragonberry and that eventually led me to discover CAF in its very early days. I used to budget $50 per payday to spend on either a golden age comic or a page of original art from eBay — and I always paid with a postal money order, sometimes in two payments. I, too, remember being able to see the other bidders’ screen names and getting into bidding wars with them just because they had beaten me on other items. I bought my first cover art, Sludge #11 by Aaron Lopresti, for $75 from Tom Fleming’s Fanfare-SE site and finally got enough art to trade Tom for the Steve Lightle Doom Patrol #1 cover that I still have. It was $1400 and I offered Tom, like, $5,000 worth of art and he kindly said, no, he would just take $1,400 worth. My next trade was with George Pantella over in Australia. Talk about a scary and very blind transaction. I didn’t know him at all, and can’t believe now that I actually made such a leap of faith, but he was an honest guy and the trade was seamless. I wanted the cover to Flash #323 very badly and found it on my very first visit to CAF, and the owner, Jim Cardillo, offered to trade it to me. I offered him the cover to Crisis on Infinite Earths #6 by George Perez and Jim politely said he wasn’t much of a Perez fan, but he would take my Ramona Fradon Super Friends cover and $800 for the Flash. I still have it, too. I ended up making fun trades with Mike Burkey, Will Gabri-El, Anthony Snyder, Tom Fleming and a few others who were around that early in the game. I bought pages from the Donnelly brothers from eBay and even made a trade with Steve many years ago to get the Saga of the Swamp Thing #3 cover, which is one of the few pieces I have hanging on my walls. For many years, I had one portfolio of art and, just in case I hit the mother load, I bought a second Itoya with an 40% off coupon at Michael’s and hoped I would one day fill it up, too. I was going to stop collecting if I could just get that much art because who would ever be able to enjoy more than that? … 22 portfolios later, and I still don’t have all that I want. My collecting tastes have changed a lot over the years, but eventually started to come full circle back around 2016. I started out buying art that I liked and could afford - a $38 Don Perlin Ghost Rider page was a big purchase for me until I paid $118 for a Klaus Janson DD #196 page featuring the best fight page with Wolverine and DD on it (that I bought in anger because I was driving the price up on an eBay rival and accidentally won it). I then fell in love with Charlton covers because they were so affordable and George Hagenauer had numerous Tom Sutton painted covers for $200-$250 each and I bought a bunch. I then bought a bunch of Miracleman art by Totleben from Miracleman collector supreme, Ricky Wong, who had nearly every page featured in the Kimota book. I lost on the Rick Veitch MM #9 birth page at $138 on eBay and the seller was Ricky, so he contacted me and offered me Totleben pages for the same price. He sold me the MM #4 cover by Starlin for $1,000 and let me make payments for three months. Then, I got into Jonah Hex art and, for the longest time, had one of the biggest Jonah Hex art collections around. After that dreadful movie, though, I lost my love for Hex art and, honestly, there’s only so many drawings of his ugly, scarred face that one can stand. Around 2016, I came back around to buying what I love and can afford and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I said about 10-15 years ago that this hobby was still on the ground floor and so many of the old curmudgeons and prophets of doom laughed at me and there were so many then (and still are) predicting the downfall of comic art. 😉😊

One, single goal: More.

You never regret the pieces you buy, but you sure do regret the ones you don’t buy so go big.

Almost a decade ago, I was spending Veronica #28 cash on Dan DeCarlo pieces LONG before that cover sold for $16K. I paid 10X the going rate for a very early Cheryl Blossom pinup and 5X the going rate for a Betty and Veronica cover and paid higher than anyone when I was trying to buy DeCarlo covers. I really overpaid for the U.S. 1 #1 and Crystar #1 covers, but they were well worth the money. There's not much I will pay that much for these days because I have most of what I ever wanted.

If I remember correctly, wasn't that the #162 Ultron cover? There are two versions of the #162 cover, the one Perez did and the published cover, which is almost exactly the same, that was done by the inker. There was a kerfuffle over it when the published cover went up for auction and a dealer sold one from his site that was the exact same image but wasn't technically by Perez.

It’s the same as in a trade: if you don’t want to pay cash and would rather do a trade - even if it’s half cash/half trade - you can expect to give up more in value because dealers aren’t in this to trade dollars for dollars or straight up. Does Anthony still have the art you traded him on his website?

That is 100% true. If they can't sell it and think they can sell your pieces easier, it makes the trade easier.