Michael Browning

I have a few pieces of Gold Key and Whitman art.

I have seen pages and the scans are pretty accurate.

A cross section of the Sunday International HA with a few notes. Mazzucchelli DD sold high. Infantino Star Wars UK art is still solid. Perkins Swamp Thing art is new and has some value. The Adam Strange prelim probably should have been listed as a cover, since those were done with very sparse lines and everything else was done by computer. Whoever got that got the deal of the auction - maybe the year. Jae Lee Namor art is hot. I thought the LaRocque Web of Spider-Man #2 page would sell higher. Wrightson Batman sketch sold fairly high, in my opinion. Hannigan Spectacular Spider-Man art keeps climbing higher and higher. That Giarrano Batman splash sold much higher than I figured. Azbats might be more popular than I imagined. Byrne Martian Manhunter sold fairly cheap. It isn’t a great piece, but I think it was a bit of a bargain and the commissioner of that piece paid more for it. Falcon Marvel Premiere page, Infantino Ms. Marvel page, Ron Wilson Spectacular Annual page and Kupperberg MTIO pages all sold very cheap.

Highs and lows, thus far.

I, too, thought the Segrelles went VERY cheap. I was expecting those to hit much higher numbers. I didn't bid on a thing, but I've watched off and on throughout the day. A lot of the big pieces underperformed, I thought.

I spoke with Jim Halperin last night and he and his team agreed that it is Dan Adkins AFTER John Buscema and they will be making the change today.

I did just send Heritage an email about the Silver Surfer. Another thing that makes me believe there's no JB pencils under the Adkins inks: If you notice, that's NOT John Buscema's signature style at all.

I'm not sure.I just remember there was a bit of confusion about some of the commissions Adkins did late in his life, where he signed his name and the artist who he was swiping. Too many of those have been sold and resold over the years as being by "pencils by Artist X and inks by Dan Adkins," when, in reality, the penciler never even touched the art. I'm just wondering if this is one of those (I think it is).

Does anyone believe that there are any John Buscema pencils underneath the Dan Adkins inks? Wasn't this around the time Adkins was doing those look-alike drawings for collectors where he would draw a commission in the style of, say, Buscema? Am I misremembering? https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/illustrations/john-buscema-and-dan-adkins-silver-surfer-illustration-original-art-1999-/a/7345-52060.s?type=bidnotice-tracked-dailystatus

I looked at it very closely and the blue and black are both very vibrant and don't appear to be sun faded, which is why I believe it's a spoilage copy. It may be a case of the printing press not having the right amount of the Y color which would leave a hint of yellow, but the red is definitely not there at all. I think the yellow is just from the paper, though.

The Magenta and Yellow plates are missing from the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) printing process in that cover. It's a book that should have been tossed in the trash as part of the spoilage, which are test copies printed at the start of the run to get the colors correct. Some of these slip through every now and again, but they are very rare and can be very valuable.

Well, now, I was wondering when that was ever going to pop up again.

Almost all DC art, except Batman, Sandman and Alan Moore-written series. It really hurts when a movie is announced.

I like reading other people’s thoughts and opinions on the market. It’s good to discuss it. I avoid posts I don’t want to read. 🤷🏼‍♂️

To your first point, you directed it to me, but I don’t think you meant to do that. My comments haven’t referenced pop art.

You might be right. I follow a cross-section in each auction and take notes on the end results and I haven’t seen it to a large extent, but I might be missing those pages. I think that, for the 2020-2021 period, ALL art was going up and I am seeing that settle down. I see values dropping severely in the main DC titles, but then art from series like Vigilante are soaring. With Marvel, I have noticed common pages have settled a bit, but I attribute the 50% drop to people just paying crazy-high prices for those pages when they were trying to grab everything that seemed even remotely affordable. Those buyers were never going to see a return on investment for several years and a lot are selling now and losing money.

Are we seeing a softening of the market or is it really a shift? I see some art sell really high, for example the Nick Cardy Brave and the Bold page for $28,000 and the Veronica 28 cover for nearly $16K — and, to a lesser extent, a Zot! page that sold for $811 on eBay this week. I’m seeing 1990s Ghost Rider art sell in the thousands most every time a page comes up for sale. Some prices have leveled off, but, mainly, that’s art that was purchased at 2020-2021 COVID cash prices and now the owners are selling at losses, which was inevitable in a lot of cases. But, the original art market is still very strong, overall. I see the recent auction results as proof backing up what I said the last two years - it’s going to take YEARS to break even on art bought in the COVID-era at sky-high prices because people - in their stay-at-home boredom and their excitement over having extra cash to throw at art - paid way too much.

I thought it would go for HALF of that! I mean, the original, published cover and video game art is all covered under the inks, so they're basically destroyed, gone. It's a commission now, so I was surprised at the high price that it sold for. I would almost bet the current buyer won't be able to get his money back if he decides to resell anytime in the next decade.

And why isn’t Stan Lee’s signature on there?!?

This caused me to go back and study the picture of the Veronica cover and I was wondering what the heck you were seeing that I wasn’t. 😳

I agree, but I figured it MIGHT hit $7000. I was the high bidder for a second or two early on and knew it would go very high, but that's a HUGE amount for a modern Archie cover.

People, I haven’t seen anybody commenting on this shocker (and just recently, I was trash talking Archie art collectors for being so cheap):

I watched that one just to see how it would perform and I was very surprised at the end result. I hope the buyer knew what he was getting.

What makes you think that? First appearance page with both characters on it, so I don’t think it’s gone too high. I know at least one collector who was willing to go big for it and I’m sure there are at least a couple more, so $12,000 doesn’t seem that high to me.

It's definitely not Don Simpson.