delekkerste

That Sale DD DPS in the Platinum Session was breathtaking. $36K for that and $57.6K for the cover...prices were very strong I thought.

$72K for the first lot of 22 Batman #426 pages $78K for the second lot of 22 Batman #426 pages Looks like some fatigue absorbing all of this Death in the Family art in such a short time (Batman #428 22 pager went for $288K in June and #429 22-pager went for $156K in September; granted, both of these are more important issues, but, still a lot to like in #426 for fans of this storyline)

I actually thought that, on the whole, prices were more reasonable than the last time out, and ended up buying 3 pieces (all in the $1-3K range). I also considered some other pieces that I thought were either priced to sell or at least priced potentially to sell.

What the what? According to this, there are Signature Auctions in November, December and January, plus the weeklies and other specialized comic/comic art auctions.

Yep - there are a lot more high-end buyers than there used to be, but, let's face it...the air still thins out very quickly after a couple/few hundred grand for a single piece, especially if it's not uber-mainstream. That said, I would think that Swampy #1 cover is big enough that it should be somewhere in the 2.5 to 3.5x range after 6 years. Though, since the owner is Jim H., I'm sure his motivation to sell is low-to-non-existent.

#Boris4Lyfe

Wasn't this one recently available privately for a 5-figure amount? In any case, it was closer to $100K than $1 million. Well, we know this one recently changed hands, since Tom Fish posted it on CAF a few months ago. It sold for a big price, but, not anywhere near $1 million. Batman #423...no way IMO. Batman #619 recently sold at auction for $504K - big price, but, nowhere near a million. The $1 million mark remains a significant hurdle when it comes to Copper Age comic art.

Whoops, sorry, posted this in the wrong Forum! Thought I had this open to The Water Cooler.

The Original Comic Art Collectors page on Facebook has 7.4K members and has been the most active forum to talk about comic art since it launched in 2018. I noticed pretty quickly that it was cannibalizing activity on Comic Art Fans, which I suspect was part of the impetus to expand CAF's programming the past 2-3 years (and Bill has done a great job with that, hats off to him). As for why everyone isn't here, to be brutally frank, I've heard it said by many people: a lot of people just don't like the personalities here. Whether people agree or not, there's a perception out there that this Forum is dominated by keyboard warriors who will attack you and try to tear you down (Burkey I know has felt attacked here in the past, and he definitely was) and/or who are talking out of their azz and think they know more than they do (I'm sure some have leveled this criticism against me on occasion, though, I know that it's mostly directly at others here). Some have also levied the criticism that people talk too much about "the market" vs. the art. I personally think it's a bit unfair, as the art doesn't change whereas the market does. But, the fact remains: many prefer the Facebook group where the atmosphere is very genial and easy-going, people stick to talking mostly about the art itself, and there is very little confrontation, arguing, trolling, etc. I personally think the ability for long-form discussion here is far superior to the Facebook group's, but, no doubt that group gets far more eyeballs and participation. Also, I know that there are numerous smaller, private groups out there on Slack, Internet messenger and WhatsApp where people can chat freely among a tight circle of friends (I'm probably part of a half dozen or so of them). If someone really wants to challenge the Facebook group's supremacy with a superior platform, there is only one obvious choice: Discord. I am a member of numerous Discords, mostly for sports cards, and you get even more participation than you see on Facebook with the platform advantages of a message board like this one. I'm surprised there isn't a Discord for OA that has gained critical mass (that I am aware of).

I think both of those fall way short of $1M, personally. I think the reality is that a lot of covers that were in the, say, $100-300K range 3-5 years ago are higher now, but, probably only a few of those would crack $1M today. Those pieces that were already $500-750K then, though, are likely $1M+ now. I mean, let's look at Heritage - if you exclude the Frazettas, underground comic art, and EC/horror art (incl. the Wrightson Frankie cover) to just get to true mainstream comic book art, here's what we've seen to date: Secret Wars #8 page - $3.36M DKR #1 cover - $2.4M Hulk #180 page - $657K ASM #328 cover - $657K TOS #59 splash - $630K Batman #251 cover - $600K Batman #619 triple gatefold cover - $504K FF #86 cover - $480K ASM #100 cover - $478K DKR #2 cover - $478K So, really, we've only seen a handful of mainstream comic art pieces sell even in the mid-6 figures at auction. And literally zero pieces have sold in the high 6-figure range (there are, of course, two 7-figure pieces, one of which is considered to be an extreme outlier). My guess is that many of the pieces listed above probably sell in the mid-to-high 6 figure range and don't just surge past $1M without more mid-to-high 6 figure sales having laid the groundwork first. To be sure, some of the pieces mentioned thus far in this thread are (and have been for some time) $1M+ pieces, but, I think many of them fall short (far short in some cases). The pool of buyers in the lower 6-figure range ($100-300K) has definitely deepened, but, I think it still thins out pretty quickly after that.

Because he was hoovering up all the A+ art in sight!! Two other collectors in the same week described his buying to me in vacuum-like terms sometime back around the early 2010s. And, so, the legend of The Vacuum was born!

I haven't heard of any connection between the Woos. In any case, the cover was sold to The Vacuum (a.k.a. CAF member J L) many years ago at this point.

Internet means a bid submitted online prior to the live session and not using the Heritage Live system of proxy bids.

You do realize that nadir means "the lowest point", right?

At the end of the day, there is always money out there - it just boils down to whether people are willing to spend it. Even billionaires will throttle back if their portfolio tanks from $7 billion to $3 billion. If there is widespread misery, many will throttle back simply because "it doesn't feel right" or because they have other things occupying their headspace. You said that prices didn't drop or flatten at the start of the pandemic, but, if you had tried to sell a bunch of art the 2nd week of March 2020, how well would you have done? Probably not as well as you would have done 2-3 months earlier. I think this gets lost when looking back in hindsight because we know that the lockdown dynamic very rapidly spurred a huge societal shift into goods vs. services since everyone was locked down at home with nothing else to spend their money on, and unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus threw gasoline on the fire. But, now we are in a macro environment where liquidity is being systematically drained away to fight inflation, and every month that passes more and more asset classes get ensnared in what is morphing into a vicious bear market that may still only be in its early or mid-innings, while the Chinese and European economies are rapidly deteriorating before our eyes. I don't expect people to be able to say "it's still going up" about anything for much longer. And, remember - no less an authority than Jim Halperin explicitly cited market conditions for what many felt was a disappointing result on the DKR #1 cover sale. Well, guess what - after a fake-out dead cat bounce in July and August, most asset classes have plunged back close to the worst levels of the year. Tens of trillions of dollars of paper wealth have been wiped out already globally. I think it says something about the extreme nature of current market sentiment that people think it's crazy if someone suggests that prices might - gasp - take a breather soon. A breather at record price levels 200% above 3 years ago. Shocking!! We're at a point in history where people believe that OA is safe as CDs with the upside of the Nasdaq in a bull market. Even if prices gallop higher from here, you can't tell me that people are being realistic about the actual levels of risk in the market. At the OA meet-up the other night, some voiced the opinion that they were confident in prices because the OA market is so deep with buyers these days. While I think it's undeniable at this point that a lot of fresh blood & money has entered the market, I think this hobby is still niche enough where if you took 1 or 2 bidders out of the running on a lot of pieces, you'd see vastly different results (and you could always lose some bidders at the margin in a bad macro environment). For the avoidance of doubt, a "flattening out" <> "a crash". Most high-end art is in strong hands who will just sit on their collections through any downturn. But it's what happens at the margins that will be interesting to see.

If 99.9% of the market is crashing, but 0.1% isn't, it's a crash. It isn't just the speculative junk that crashed in cards, most blue chip cards have also tanked from peak levels. Just because there are a handful of uber-wealthy guys duking it out over Justin Herbert RPAs (rookie patch autos) doesn't change that fact. And trophy sports memorabilia pieces is really a separate market entirely. Also, it's not like the only options are "raging bull market" or "crash". Do I think the OA market will crash soon? No. Do I think that that prices will flatten out in light of the bigger macro picture? Very likely in the coming months IMO. Last night we had a huge OA meet-up in NYC. I think it's a little concerning that the only two possibilities that most people there seem to be entertaining are "raging bull market" or "slightly less raging bull market". Even a flat market is viewed as highly dubious and people will look at you as if you have two heads if you suggest anything worse than that. The past month has seen FOMO buying on a scale that I have never before witnessed in this hobby. People were spending like money was burning a hole in their pockets. I have many friends who got caught up big time - it's like everybody decided to shoot their wad at once. I can very easily see the market start to flatten out, with certain segments starting to correct over the next 6-9 months if the macro environment continues to deteriorate, as I fully expect it will.

There are some fools at the tippety-top of the hobby still throwing around insane money on an ever-narrowing number of cards. Most cards peaked in Q1 2021 and are well off their highs (50%+ in many/most cases). High end cards largely held up until this year but every month that has passed has claimed more victims to the ever-growing bear market. That Mantle card undershot many peoples' expectations at $12.6 million. In many of these insane sales, you're seeing pent-up demand for rare objects that have not been available for sale for decades and so of course you're going to get huge prices. That said, in many cases, the prices would have been even more 6-12 months ago, so, arguably, values have already declined. Case in point, and taking it back to comic book art - a piece sold at auction at Heritage back in 2019. Earlier this year, the same piece got an offer of $X through Heritage's Make an Offer system that was turned down by the owner, who ended up consigning it to Heritage where it actually sold for less to a friend. That buyer from earlier this year was no longer at that level.

Oh right, heard that the Vince Oliva collection was consigned to Heritage recently (which is where this one is from).

I know several guys playing in this sandbox now who were much more active in vintage mainstream art, say, 5 years ago, and I suspect a lot of that because of the relative value proposition (though, that has been narrowing in recent auctions).

The value proposition isn't there right now, and it's just not comparable to previous markets when prices were pennies and nickels on today's dollar. We're in a market where even some C-level pieces are fetching what A-level pieces got in very recent memory. I can kind of understand the price inflation for the true quality pieces, but, it's gotten so indiscriminate over the past couple of years to the point where so much drek is getting prices no one ever dared dream of, with FOMO buying and people priced out of better material bidding up lower-end pieces to levels that would have seemed absurd 2-3 years ago and bidding up B/B+ medium-end pieces to hard A-quality levels from that time as well. As one very longtime collector noted to me the other day: "This isn't going to end well, is it?" Pretty sad that this is where we are these days. But it's also why I've had so much more fun and bought so much more stuff in other collectibles verticals (trading cards, sealed record albums, RPGs, event tickets & programs, signed books, etc.) the past few years. Even at the inflated pandemic-era prices in those sub-markets, the price points are rounding errors compared to where most OA is nowadays.

Nostalgia isn't limited to just the stuff that came out while you were growing up. It can also include/extend to, among other things: - characters you loved growing up in material that may have pre or post-dated what came out when you were a kid. For example, you may have grown up on Death of Superman, but, in your older age, that nostalgic interest may drive you to collect Curt Swan Superman or Frank Quitely All-Star Superman - things you read as back issues or reprints but pre-dated what came out while you were a kid. For example, I read the Ditko and Romita ASM reprints in Marvel Tales, the Neal Adams X-Men run in the X-Men Classics reprint series from 1983, Byrne and Cockrum X-Men from Classic X-Men, Barry Smith Conan from Conan Saga, Tomb of Dracula from picking up quarter bin books at my LCS, many EC stories in the Gladstone reprints of the late '80s, etc. As such, I have nostalgia for all of this material today even though it was all published before I started reading comics in 1983. - received wisdom when you were a kid. It's not like when you start reading comics that you're only limited to reading what's coming out then and going forward. You learn from reading and word of mouth what are the important books and runs and characters and who are the important creators and so that stays with you for as long as you are collecting - the thrill of finding new comics to read and art to enjoy as an adult may mirror - nostalgically - the thrill you got doing the same as a kid. And that can lead you back in time or back to the future, as it were. So, basically, I'm saying that nostalgia manifests itself in various ways... As for those Andru pages, it's Spider-Man, it's Bill Everett, it's a character with a long history who is as relevant as ever today, penciled by one of the top 10 artists associated with the character (Ross Andru) and inked by one of the all-time greats in Bill Everett.

That's not his arm.

I don't think time is necessarily on our side as the median age of vintage OA collectors is probably not that much lower than the median age of vintage OA dealers. Somebody sent me a YouTube link recently of one of the early NJ Comic Art Shows from 9 years ago. Boy, did we all look a LOT younger back then. I do think you're right that, eventually, without successors (and without a pipeline of young vintage dealers coming up to replacement, especially without the benefit of having gotten in on the ground floor like the old guard), a lot of the art they hold will get sold and I've already mentioned that it's probably a ticking clock as to these guys giving up the convention side of the business. That said, they can certainly keep going strong for a long time with their websites and social media-based sales. And I know some dealers will end up passing much of the art down to heirs, even if those heirs don't continue their dealing businesses, so, the art could actually take a very long time to disperse back into the marketplace. If the mass liquidations of their collections don't happen for another 15-20+ years, a lot of people who care now probably won't then, as we'll all be AARP members ourselves. There will, of course, also be lots of selling of Gen X collections in time, which could very well ultimately cause a secular tipping point in the OA market. That said, since it'll be my generation eventually cashing out, I'm not counting on still being young enough to care by the time those pieces do hit the market at lower prices than whatever the secular peak ends up being.

"He responded that he never raises prices on things he had bought." This is what I was referring to. I'd definitely like to get Bechara's side of the story because I can't believe that any dealer would claim to "never raise prices on things they had bought" - that is what I am saying is easily disprovable, every dealer does it all the time because that is the business. That had to be Bechara misspeaking, being taken out of context or some other form of miscommunication. As an aside, even if dealers perpetually keep pricing art just out of buyers' reach, those pieces would be screaming buys at some of the levels of previous price hikes. OA ain't refrigerators and countless pieces in this hobby end up selling for more later on after people passed on them at (much) lower levels.