Michael Browning

My purchases embody my personal sense of nostalgia, too, so I totally understand that, but I also live on a government worker's salary and have a mortgage and a car payment, so I have to be very aware of how I spend every dollar I make. I have been very blessed to have bought earlier than most people, so I don't have a ton of money in some of the great art I've got. But, I've said this probably a hundred times: I'm very realistic and know that I am 51 years old and, as much as I would love to keep this stuff for the rest of this life and into the next, it just isn't possible -- and who wants to die with all this stuff when you've got no family to leave it to? My wife hates all of it until I sell a piece here or there and pay something off or put some cash into our account. I'm certainly not rich enough to just sit around and enjoy it every day, though I think it's great that you and your dad are/were able to do that. I've often said that the one thing rich folks have that us average people don't is the luxury of time.

Man, I can remember when those Wolveroach issues fetched a pretty penny and were highly sought after. I have several of the phone books that I've gotten for cheap that I need to put up for sale. They seem to be harder to find in the wild these days when it used to be that every comic shop had at least the first three books in stock at all times.

I warned him that he would lose money on the Cerebus. He made a profit on the whole collection that the Cerebus came in, but the Cerebus were just sitting there for months. A couple weeks ago, I walk into his shop and saw he had $100 written on the box and he asked if I still wanted them. I said I did, but not even at $100 because they are almost unsellable, so he came down to my price. I looked them up and even mycomicshop doesn’t buy that many of them and those they do buy, they only pay pennies for those very few issues.

The owner wanted $1600 for them. A dealer bought his whole collection of comics and got them with it. The dealer wanted $1200 for the Cerebus. I offered $300 and he turned me down. After four months of not selling a single issue, he sold them to me for $50. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Newsflash: That IS original art.

The CGC company and its business is all about grading your collectibles in order for you to get a higher return on investment. Plain and simple. No doubt about it. It’s why they charge higher for key books because that’s what CGC is all about - a better return on investment and you pay for that. They offer pressing and cleaning services. That’s exactly for a return on investment. They do slab artwork. This is an art chat board on the CGC site, so, yes, this entire chat board is about returns.

I just read the news. So sad.

True story: I bought a VF/NM collection of Cerebus #8-#300 two weeks ago for $50.

I mean, these are the CGC boards, after all, so all the talk should be about returns, right?

I picked these up last week:

I love all the art that I have. I don't have much framed and hanging on the walls. I have a Frazetta oil and two Frazetta drawings, a Tom Yeates Saga of the Swamp Thing cover, the Mike Okamoto Lost in Space 1 cover painting, a Teri S. Wood Swamp Thing painting, another Okamoto cover painting, a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Magazine comic page and, my favorite piece in my collection, the Bob Larkin Crystar #1 cover painting. The rest all stay in portfolios that I look through quite often. I like to take time to look through them, enjoying each and every piece from time to time.

I will usually buy any cover at this price, but, it's not a good cover designwise, and then tiny Punisher in the background and, the third strike is that it's a modern cover that's bad and has a tiny Punisher.

Steranko probably still has the cover to #1.

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ Oh yeah, I have made a trade this year! My apologies! We made a great trade that was good for both of us and I am so appreciative of you doing that! (Man, my memory is terrible.) I haven’t made a trade with a dealer this year, though. 😉

Keep this in mind: Dealers say it's easier to sell one big piece than it is to sell several lower-priced pieces. That's been told to me several times over the 25 years I've been collecting and, although art I've tried to trade up for has sat for many years on some dealers' sites while my smaller pages sold almost immediately upon me putting them up for sale, that's generally the rule they go by. Here's another tip: Dealers don't often like to trade one, big piece of Marvel art for a bunch of DC art. I know there are those who don't believe Marvel art sells better and higher than DC art, but it sure does. When making a trade with a dealer, you also have to give a little extra, because, unless your piece is a Todd McFarlane ASM cover and you're offering to trade it for a Murphy Anderson Mystery in Space cover of equal value (is that even possible? Nah, I'm just saying, is all) a straight-up trade rarely works. They're not in this to trade piece for piece and dollar for dollar. So, think about what the incentive to trade with you would be for a dealer and go at it from that angle. Nowadays, dealers aren't easy to trade with. Back in the good old days of the late-1990s and early-2000s, dealers were a lot more fun to deal with and they were often open to trades. Now, not so much. Trades can be a lot of fun. I get the itch once or twice a year to try to make a trade, and have made many trades in the past, but I don't think I've made one at all this year.

I filled six portfolios last year, but only four this year. I bought my wife a car in late September and it took a chunk out of my war chest. But, I wasn’t buying like I had in the past few years. In 2022, I filled six portfolios and found some decent deals; this year, the deals were all dried up. I didn’t buy too many major pieces this year because I’ve mostly got what I wanted and collectors who paid way too much in 2021 and 2022 for art were looking to make a profit and it was at prices I just couldn’t afford. Even when I had the cash for a piece like the Ghost Rider #70 cover by Budiansky, I didn’t want to pay $21,000+ to get it back (I owned it 20 years ago). It’s a great cover and I’m the biggest Budiansky fan, but, if I needed to sell it, getting my cash back would have been nigh impossible and I don’t take selling at a loss lightly. (I dropped a quarter in the checkout line at a Books-A-Million back in 2006 and was talking with a guy in the line and forgot to pick it up and I still have nightmares about that lost quarter…) I never set any goals for the upcoming year. I just buy what I like and what I can afford. There are still deals out there and I hope to buy my 2,000th piece of art in 2024, but, I still don’t have any goals to meet. BTW, I love the idea of smaller meetups. It’s more personal and you can talk and enjoy the time with other art collectors and wheel and deal a little. I would love to do that with some of my Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia friends.

That’s a really cool cover because the artist snuck Woody Woodpecker into a Disney Ducks cover. Could this be the first-ever crossover of the characters? 😉

I also have this: the Carl Barks original cover art to Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #504. This is the cover Barks drew and submitted and then it was redrawn to make a few changes. It was the last Ducks cover he drew. Barks sold it to Disney Ducks collector Denver Sherry and Denver’s family sold it after he died. I’ve had it for years and had forgotten to post it with the other Gold Key art I have.

They have the right to be disappointed, no matter what they paid for the art. The estimates given were realistic, but the market is in a bit of a downturn, and I told them both that. I watch all the auctions and I see the trends. I won’t sell right now, unless I’d absolutely have to. Collectors seem to be holding onto their cash. I do think that a lot of buyers paid way too much for art in the last couple years and are getting scared (rightfully so) that they won’t be able to get their money back. I’m pretty sure some of them saw certain artists’ pages and covers selling very high and paid higher prices as an investment who are now not able to get even close to break-even on those pages. I’ve got several friends who have lost money on art they’ve consigned to Heritage and C-Link that should have done better, but didn’t. You can point to pieces selling higher than you thought they would, but that happens in every auction. It doesn’t mean the market is still as hot as 2021. For every piece you point to that sold high, I can show you 10 other pieces that sold much lower than they should have, if the market was still on the rise. I don’t think there’s a “Great Crash” happening like some of the grouchy old doomsday prophets who regularly post on these boards. But there is a bit of a cooling off or a plateauing of prices.

Nice finds. A couple years ago, I found nearly an entire run of Cheryl’s appearances - including Betty and Veronica 320, her first appearance - at a shop for a dollar each. I couldn’t hardly get the cash out of my wallet fast enough. All of those early CB appearances are tough to find and usually expensive when they do pop up.

Dollar box books I found.

While I am a fan of his E-Man, Huntress and Green Lantern, I never could get into his Moe Howard-crossed-with-triangle-head-Sub-Mariner-looking Guy Gardner. It looked very silly and cartoony and I hated the cowboy boots DC had Guy wear in his new costume. I did love the Beau Smith run. First and foremost, it was a lot of fun and the art is great. Then, it doesn’t hurt that Beau is a native West Virginian and lives not too far from me (I run into him frequently).

Actually, the series ran 44 issues, a Zero issue and two annuals and has a strong cult following for the Beau Smith-written #0, 17-44 and two annuals half of the run.

I think that, despite the Liefeld Cap art selling so high, we are definitely not in the same market as we were in 2021. A friend had more than 60 pieces in the auction and he told me the end results were $50,000 lower than the HA estimates. Another friend was given a $6,000 estimate on a really early strip he consigned to HA and it only got $3,600 and he was very disappointed. He has three more coming up in the next Wednesday auction and he’s worried they’re not going to do well at all. I asked him last night if we plans to consign more to them and he was unsure. He has several more strips to auction, but he fears the low results of the big piece in this auction and the low bids on the ones in Wednesday’s auction means the other strips will sell even lower.

I think it will most likely be up for sale on a dealer’s site, but I think it will be priced at $12,000-$15,000.