cstojano

How is it that I never noticed Heritage did alpha order on their listings? I certainly noticed it for CL. Much like boarding an airplane, there must be established science on ordering strategies in auctions based on some number of variables, none of which involve the artist's last name in alpha order.

Yeah surely broad scale conspiracies are another matter. In this case bidding was very anemic across the board so I think it would be manageable to maximize sales. I can't recall but I think I ended up going through a 3rd party as well, which adds another set of eyes.

Yes its a bit of a mixed bag for sure, especially when pieces are ranked in your bidding approach. An example, the Williamson Star Wars try out strips. I feel my mind was reeling a bit during that whole process, the spread was quite large, about 2x vs the minimum as I recall. Its not unrelated to the psychology of live auction bidding but has a whiplash aspect to it. The oddest thing is people still try to snipe even when you know it extends another time interval. Its like giving the other bidder hope for 4 minutes and 58 seconds will deflate them enough that they give up. But then they have 4 minutes and 58 seconds to talk themselves into a punishment bid

What was suspicious is the same lot passed without a single bid 6 months prior at an opening of 800 Euros. I emailed with them for months trying to buy it at the opening price and they said they couldn't make it work. So they relisted it in their next auction and suddenly it sells for 5x the previous unsold opening price. Did the market move in that 6 months? Yes a bit. But to be incrementally bid up to my max in real time was a bit odd all things considered. I had put in a very high bid the night before in case I didn't wake up in time for the Paris schedule. Turns out I did and watched this all unfold. Proof? None really. But I know most of the players in that market and 1 didn't even know about the auction and the other told me to cancel the sale because I got hosed Another thing. This auction was back in 2019-2020. At the time a well known comic art dealer in Paris known for being expensive had similar pieces by the same artist (same theme/genre. etc) that they had for sale since 2009 for 1-1.5k. Was my piece better? Clearly I thought so, but objectively hard to say. edit: but you are both right. If one insane person (me) bid that much over market then who's to say there wasn't another. Then again, why are we giving auction houses and online bidding platforms the benefit of the doubt. Its not like we don't know they are allowed to bid on behalf of their clients.

This happened to me as well. CC, and similar closing auctions, is not the place to break a book where people might want multiple pages to go together.

Artcurial uses this type of closing system in their online comic art auctions, though I failed to see any mention of this in the rules. I put a high max in to ensure I won the piece and low and behold, after extensions, I won it by one increment. Hmmm, nothing suspicious there. It was the only time I ever considered just not paying because what are they going to do? But it gets better. They initially refused to take credit cards despite it being in their listed terms. So I won that battle after some exchanges via email. But then the checkout system was giving an error message and I kept trying to checkout. Well, it was going through all along and I quadruple paid (20k total). Yes, I got those payments back but with the exchange rate and banking being what it is I lost several hundred dollars because of how they processed the refunds. As frustrating as CC and Hakes bidding can be, and as frustrating as CL can be when you lose by 1 increment, I tell myself at least they aren't Artcurial (I am sure most French houses are the same).

Indeed. Easiest site I have ever used is the IRS estimated tax payments website

Lots of adjacent parallels to consider. Animation art: generally there is line art pencils copied to acetate that s then colored, placed against and background and used to shoot the film. The pencils are worth very little. People want what is actually used to make the movie. This is the opposite of comic OA (the Varley DK pieces are basically animation cels in this analogy; they sell much discounted vs the bw art they are based on). Toys: Prototype toys, I haven't followed as closely in recent years, BUT a prototype of an unreleased toy generally was a viewed as a "lost wave" type of thing and highly sought after vs the same type of prototype of a figure actually released. That's 3D art. With 2d art it is the same dynamic as with animation art. The piece most sought after would be the thing used to actually make the toy packaging, which could be as simple as a photograph of the toys with some light airbrushing. Something like this in comic OA would be considered trash. Even fully rendered art would place a much higher premium on the final product, say airbrush over an image or airbrush over a blue line, than the penciled version alone which would have little value. Comic OA is an outlier.

2024 is my year to finally take the beating I deserve. I have stuff I bought 20 years ago that won't sell for half of what I paid (not comic art). Its been sitting waiting for the market to rebound (it won't). I should make the "worst of" reel for the year I have found that losing the money stinks, for sure, but in the end I am usually glad to get whatever I can out of a piece and move on. Lost about 30% on some props this year. The lesson there is that buying fresh to market stuff is VERY costly (props came from the maker's estate - what a time to be a collector) and the excitement of the first auction viewing is rarely replicated in the bids the next go around.

I know this isn't a great example but I couldn't help think of this piece that closed last night. Never heard of the artist but a cover for an 80s era Conan portfolio I thought would do more than 200 dollars, arguments about execution aside. I have a weak spot for older material like this and get hammered all the time by overspending. I did not bid here though because I thought, well who really cares. https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/covers/jim-fletcher-conan-the-fearless-portfolio-cover-original-art-sq-productions-1986-/a/322349-46080.s?ic2=mytracked-lotspage-lotlinks-12202013&tab=MyTrackedLots-101116

Early Magic art, heck, all Magic art. Is it a 1k or 100k? I don't know and I can never guess

Just saw this on an incoming tracking number I checked. I can only imagine the grift this is/will become. Anyone with experience with this, or understand why anyone would purchase this given the timeline given for free? It kind of screams "pay us more for something we used to/should provide for free".

Shorting Cramer calls is a thing, isn't it? Is he part of the herd ?

Aren't you both arguing around the important piece related to time scale. I think tth is talking about the "blood in the streets", short term hold strategy of trading while delekkerste is talking about long-term, buy and hold investing??

Well that's concerning. I assumed most of the restoration work being done was due to sun damage in frames. Is it the colored pencils that aren't steadfast to the treatment or is the sun tanning a known "not treatable" condition. Nice Elfquest, BTW.

Interesting comment about the bleaching. I primarily need work done to mitigate sun damage from the frame, no fading of inks, just tanned. I see she did lighten some of your pieces so assume there is an alternative to "bleaching" for that. Always makes me nervous to hear about folks basically submerging the piece in some kind of solvent to remove the tanning. Its a shame Robert's site is down as he had a nice archive of before and after images, perhaps some are still on CAF. The pricing is very helpful. All restorers I have emailed of course refuse to give a price until they have the work in hand. That is quite the professional approach. But its also hard to send a low 5 figure piece to some person you read about online to do work that could be 100s or 1000s of dollars. Seems the standard is more in the 100s for standard comic art issues.

Or 100 framed oil paintings. 10k pages can sort of reasonabily be bulk stored given the lack of stickiness and overal similar size and medium. People that collect non BW art, however, man. And don't get me started on animation cels.

I didn't read it that way BUT as someone not collecting for return I admit I do have a mental disorder. But then go to CAF and see some of these people's galleries where they dozens of unique artists represented, not even counting the number of individual pieces. Its insane.

Yes I really never saw my purchases as "investing" but I'd be lying if I said I didn't wish the world/market rewarded my "taste" numerically, even if I never sold a thing.

Lots of investment talk about timing, all fair and fine. But lots of people lucked out (and continue to luck out) just by happening to be interested in the herd's interests - superheroes. Me? I have no interest in superheroes. Never had. All the talk about dead money needs to give me a visit as proof "colllecting what you love" only works if it happens to be Star Wars, superheroes, and some other properties I am forgetting, for sure.

Appreciate your input here. I get it. This is a book that has a ton of pages and I find it hard to differentiate what seems to be a lot of rather bland pages (I like the art style and the source material so...). I suspect it is Gull caugfht in the act here that drives the price, as opposed to the piece that just closed on HA where another act was being done I always think of this book when that "what makes an A+ page" thread gets bumped to the top.

Even more interesting because westerns are generally considered a dead medium, or at least way off its earlier generational highs. Reading the wiki and I can see why i wouldn't give this a second glance. Amazing that a show on politics and corruption has legs given the times we live in. So much for escapism Another show I dropped without a second thought was House of Cards. And somehow I just knew that Handmaid's Tale would never resolve

Probably not the thread, but speaking of soft prices vs not I believe this is a record for a page from this book and don't quite understand why. https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/story-page/eddie-campbell-and-eddie-campbell-from-hell-7-story-page-20-original-art-mad-love-publishing-/a/322347-49025.s?type=bidnotice-tracked-endofauction

To John's point about fragmenting viewership, I never heard of Yellowstone (the show) before your post. No clue it existed. TWD should be studied, if not already, for one specific reason. So many people, myself included, tuned out at the same time - when Negan killed two main characters. That was the end of the season as I recall and we just never cared enough to start watching again, and it wasn't like Glen was some massive fan favorite of mine either. I think it was the brutality of the scene, or just exhaustion about the whole thing, and I was one paying per episode on Monday mornings on Amazon (which I never do). At any rate, I will pop in to random threads like this on TWD and its amazing to see how many people say the same thing about when they stopped watching.

per batch, per category though. I am sure they bend the rules all the time for their best customers, but it makes one wonder how they get so many low value items in their auctions.