delekkerste

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's razor

Not to mention the many times I (and undoubtedly others) have joined the live auction a few minutes late and missed all the Neal Adams offerings entirely!

I have huge, huge nostalgia for the X-Men portfolios they did, but, yeah, they were very much of that time and don't check off all the boxes that people look for today - not main run, not pen & ink, not by a creative team tied to a run on a title, odd size, the portfolios not kept in print, etc. I'm happy to have my favorite of their X-Men portfolio plate originals and would have had interest in the one last night at a lower price. Although not expensive by mainstream superhero comic art standards at $7100 (probably close to $8,000 including tax and shipping in that frame), that's still a good chunk of change to spend on something that's considered to be niche and whose inflation-adjusted value has eroded over the past decade and so I decided that I didn't need a second example at that price.

I believe it was Rob Pistella who once told me over dinner, "Ours is a black & white hobby". As a big fan of illustration as well as comic book art, I used to wonder why color pieces so often played second-fiddle, being more attractive to many and closer to gallery/museum fine art (which obviously has a much higher ceiling in terms of financial value and critical acclaim). But, I agree with Rob - when people in the hobby (not outsiders) think about comic art, they think of B&W pieces. Not that there aren't great color pieces out there (some of my favorite pieces in my collection are color, and I definitely prefer it when it comes to illustration art), but, B&W is really what most collectors associate with the medium, given that color pieces only make up a small part of the hobby by quantity and an overwhelming majority of the better/best pieces are B&W examples.

I was watching the Fastner & Larson X-Men portfolio plate. Sold for $7100, which, after CLink's 10% cut, amounts to only an 18% increase over nearly a decade after it sold at Heritage.

There are a lot of wonderful pieces of DC original art in this sale from the estate of Kevin Brogan, who sadly passed away last month aged just 62. People here may have seen him at conventions and known him as the DC/Mid-Atlantic representative for the Hero Initiative charity. I met him a number of times over the years and actually had lunch with him just this past May. I was shocked to learn of his untimely passing recently. The art pieces are labeled "From the Estate of Kevin Brogan" but I suspect that some/all of these big Silver Age DC books may be from the estate as well, as that was very much his jam. R.I.P. Kevin.

Still not strong.

It was 2022. Usually when the Fed has to start cutting rates, earnings are on the cusp of imploding and stocks go down. If you had bought when the Fed started cutting rates, you would have gotten destroyed in the last two major bear markets. The Fed began cutting rates on Sep. 18, 2007 - the S&P 500 topped out 3 1/2 weeks later and ultimately went down 57.8%. The Fed began cutting rates on Jan. 3, 2001. The S&P had already started its bear market by then, but, fell another 41.4% into the October 2002 low from the point when they started cutting rates. You sell the first rate cut and buy the last rate cut.

They are part of the herd, and the herd never stopped being bullish on NVDA/mega cap tech even during last year's decline. Anyway, the bigger point, which is settled science, is that the preponderance of the evidence does not support the contention that it has paid to go against the herd in either stocks or OA in most of recent memory. Maybe that will change going forward as @KirbyCollector suggests (for stocks). Maybe it won't. I am but a simple Garfield-collecting OA collector and will leave it to others to opine on such weighty matters.

While exceptions to the rule can be found in both the stock and OA markets, generally speaking, it has been more financially rewarding in recent memory to turn off the logic centers in your brain and just open your wallet and buy what everybody else likes. Boring financial part in the spoiler section:

It actually hasn't been for a long time (for reasons that I won't bore people here with). Yep, "buy what you like" only works on a financial basis if lots of other people like it as well.

What about this unpublished Spy vs. Spy? You posted the image but didn't comment on it. I liked it a lot and underbid it. Probably would have gone a little higher had I been watching it live and not just thrown in a proxy bid in advance.

If you enjoyed early TWD and just got tired of the show later on, it's worth giving the new shows a chance as the new characters, scenery & storylines have finally given us something different and worthwhile. That's when my wife walked away. Definitely a major hopping-off point for many - I thought about dropping it myself then but ended up sticking with it. Around that time and its immediate aftermath was the low point of the series IMO; I think it hit its stride again the last couple of seasons but so many people had already pulled the ripcord by then.

There's no contradiction at all here. Just because doing something crazy/reckless/stupid worked out in the end does not mean that it was the smart move at the time (the process counts for more than the result). Choosing to have your OA purchases delivered to the cardboard box you're living in (IIRC, there's an anecdote in Glen Gold's excellent OA article that he did for Playboy years ago describing something very close to this ) does not say anything about your intelligence or powers of foresight and says everything about the market bailing out your mental illness.

Surprised by the price? Yes. Surprised that it fetched a record for this book? Not at all. I didn't care for From Hell at all (going so far as to sell my TPB on eBay immediately after finishing reading it in the early 2000s), but, as far as important/memorable pages go, they don't get much/any better than this. Gull doing his nastiest work and then having a vision of the future...whenever I'm in East London, this scene always seems to pop in my head.

What ultimately made people look smart was largely having the financial wherewithal (from either their real-world finances and/or having built up art capital after getting in early) and/or just being so insanely devoted to the art that they held on while many others sold out too soon. As I consider myself to be part of the former group, I don't think I'm speaking out of turn by saying that. I have to say it was less smarts and more having enough cash to indulge my slavering inner fanboy without ever feeling the need to sell that allowed me to build the collection I have, as has been the case with many other owners of excellent OA collections. Between getting in early; idiosyncratic luck/opportunity. massive bankroll; undying devotion for OA leading to an unwillingness to sell; and smarts/foresight, I'd say that "smarts/foresight" has been the variable that has had the least influence on the building of great collections in our hobby. If anything, being crazy/reckless has proven to be a better strategy than being "smart", as the market has made most decisions that looked crazy at the time look smart in hindsight. And it really was mostly a case of + making people look smart over time rather than any inherent superior foresight. Again, there's no shortage of examples like this in my own collection - plenty of pieces that I was happy to overpay for at the time without any expectation that I'd ever see that money again. Let's just chalk it up to "it's better to be lucky than smart."

@Rick2you2 Don't take it personally, Tim basically insulted the whole Board by trying to throwing a jab my way since virtually no one "put every available dollar into the stock market and other assets at those times", because most people like to sleep well at night, have real-world problems to deal with in times of economic stress/crisis and global pandemics, and don't live in a world where where everything is guaranteed to go up back up after a fall and people have the perfect foresight to see it happening in advance.

OK, but, it's not like we haven't seen a ton of pages offered at auction, on CAF and on dealer sites/at conventions that we don't know what the current state of the market is.

It's a high price, but, I think Marcos only did this one storyline? There was an amazing page from this issue available at the Society of Illustrators sale recently that I was thinking about picking up, but, when I went back a few minutes later, a well-known dealer had already come in and scooped it up for his inventory. IIRC, it was priced somewhere in the $2Ks (if I'm wrong, it was somewhere in the $3Ks) and was better than the $4200 page above.

Yeah it's a bloodbath if you account for the time value of money. I'm guessing this is something that, like BWS Conan art, is not going to appeal to @Xatari and friends (i.e., the newer generation of collectors).

It ended pretty much exactly where I thought it would. It is the ultimate baller FU money piece. "I can pay $132K for this, not because it's good, but simply because it amuses me."

Well, that's newer collectors, not guys like yourself. While I think there's some truth there, it feeds into the bigger picture of generally changing tastes over time for various reasons and not necessarily specific to BWS Conan. I think we've seen time and again that people go nuts when something that wasn't available for so long suddenly becomes available. That said, even if some of this primo BWS Conan stuff comes out now/soon and sells for huge prices, please resist the urge to do a sack dance proclaiming the undying robust health of the BWS Conan market. Trust me when I say that I know people who were ready and willing to pay far-into-the-future prices for some of this material a decade ago and that whatever prices these pieces might fetch now probably aren't much (if at all) higher in a lot of cases.

Well, sure, but, the early art has been what it is for more than half a century - did everyone just suddenly wake up and realize that it wasn't necessarily all that? More likely is that there's just been a change in tastes (fantasy vs. superhero, '70s-era styles vs. mid-80s to the present modern looks) among the collector base. I think there's still a lot to like about the early covers and, with the exception of the #2 outlier ($264K during the collectibles mania of 2021) and the #15 (Elric was always going to get a decent price - $150K), it's been pretty disappointing to see this parade of early covers (#5, 6, 10, 11) sell for what I consider to be pretty disappointing prices the past couple of years. Even if the amounts don't look that low to some, just think about what else (far lesser art, IMO) sells for those prices or more these days and what the relative valuation differential was 10 years ago.

This was the first Moon Knight issue I ever read (because of the X-Men appearance). I had the cover already and was happy to add this page as well, for far below my max bid. I also bought the TMNT HC Vol. 1 with the vintage (1988) Eastman & Laird head sketches. Sold for the minimum bid, half of the low estimate.

Yeah, I think that is practically axiomatic at this point. Mainstream super-heroes ascended to the top of the pop culture pyramid over the past 15 years. I wouldn't say sword & sorcery died during that time (witness the popularity of GoT), but, nobody can credibly argue that Conan specifically is as big a character as he was in the 1970s and 80s - not coincidentally, when most of the people still collecting Conan were in the teens and 20s. When I started collecting comic art in late 2002, BWS Conan was so revered that most people would have considered it to be one of the essential building blocks of a well-rounded comic art collection. And people who grew up with the comics and movies in the '70s and '80s were largely in their 30s and 40s, hitting their stride career-wise and buying up the art. Nowadays, there is just so little interest in Conan among younger collectors and it's really the 50-60+ crowd propping the market up at a more or less flattish level for the most part. Personally, I'm a huge Conan fan. I started reading the original REH stories in 1982, a year before I discovered comics, and I collected the comics throughout the '80s and loved the movies (I picked up a lot of the comics, collected editions, audiobooks, etc. in the 2000s and 2010s as well). To me, it's unfortunate that the early BWS art no longer has the relevance and appreciation that it did 10-20 years ago. It gives me no pleasure to point out that it's in a state of secular stagnation at best, but, it's so obvious at this point and people should be aware of that both in terms of if they are contemplating buying or selling and also as a cautionary tale about what can happen due to the shifting whims of the collector base over a decade or two.