delekkerste

It'll probably just migrate to eBay or PWCC or other auction houses if Heritage sticks with the $49 minimum BP for music items.

I'm sure that NY Post story was erroneous - I saw that it linked to a sale listing and it didn't make any sense to me. Cool piece but $9.85 million I don't think is anywhere near the realm of plausible unless there is a backward baseball-cap wearing Powerball winner out there who thinks they can flip this as the "Bob Ross rookie". But, nah, not even then - no one is paying anywhere near that price for this painting.

A must-watch

Yeah, but (a) still sealed with correct 1st pressing markings including the fan club postcard still present under the rear shrink and (b) third party graded at a cost of $50. Plus, I collect sealed albums and $61 for this record in that condition is on the low side for raw. I'm not saying it was crazy low, but, I would have expected it to fetch at least $80-100, if not low $100s. That said, my point was less about pointing out how low these sales were, but, rather, the disparity between the hammer price and the final price for the above sales. Netting, say, $13 in a best case hammer-plus scenario, is just for the consignor, and netting $1 for the Vangelis is just . $49 minimum BP for music & entertainment items, many of which don't fetch OA-type prices, is just .

LOL, yeah, a Pat Benatar graded album sold for $61 ($12 hammer, $49 BP) as well. $50 ($1 hammer, $49 BP) for Vangelis, sheesh.

LOL, Heritage has a rare turquoise lettering copy of Zeppelin's first LP up for auction later today. Current bid is $4,125 including BP. #LedZeppelinRookie

A bunch of third-party grading companies for records popped up almost overnight over the past year or so. DJ Steve Aoki is backing one of them although Heritage seems to have struck up some kind of partnership with a fellow Texas-based grading company. Here's a slabbed, sealed record up for auction at Heritage this week. For sealed records, they grade the cover and the shrink wrap to come up with the overall grade. For opened records, they grade the record, cover, inner sleeve and labels to come up with the overall grade. I have actually been collecting mostly sealed records for the past 2-3 years. For me, it's primarily a nostalgia thing, though, after the videogame pump and then the VHS market pump, I became metaphysically certain that it was only a matter of time before they got to records, cassettes and CDs and I was proven correct. I'm actually sending in my first batch of records to be graded this weekend! I have audiophile friends who are snobby about not being able to play sealed and/or graded records, but, you could make the same argument for slabbed comics, toys, videogames, VHS, etc. where the original product can no longer be used as intended; it's really only trading cards where there is no meaningful loss of functionality after slabbing.

If you weren't aware, the latest collectible to get the backward-baseball cap wearing speculator pump is graded record albums. The pumpers are actually referring to debut albums as things like "the Black Sabbath rookie". I wish I was joking.

Salaciousness sells!

I may not have won the Alex Raymond Flash Gordon Sunday, but, I feel like I already won Heritage this week, having picked up this naked, phallic Jon Sable cover by Bill Jaaska for only $312 in the Wednesday weekly auction (for 1/1000th the price!) (but I really did pick it up )

Cover > panel page Neal Adams > Ron Frenz

It's well done, but with Conan half-turned and the lady all the way turned, there are several others that I like better. I've always thought that SSOC #7 was the best one he did, though, #1 (with Red Sonja to boot) would of course be the most valuable.

Boris Vallejo SSOC #12 Cover at Heritage today = $78,000 Barry Windsor-Smith Conan #5 Cover at CLink last week: $70,000 (To be sure, the SSOC is a better Boris work than the Conan #5 is a great example of BWS' work...but still. )

Yeah, Miller pencils on the board and I think it goes for probably double that amount now (and would have gone for even more than that at the height of the market, IMO).

Alex Raymond Flash Gordon Sunday...$312,000 I asked Heritage at SDCC what their price expectation was and was told they thought it had a good shot at $100K+. I said I wouldn't be surprised at $250K+. Sadly, I was correct.

I don't want to break confidences, but, some consignors are taking a bath today. Not going to point out specific pieces, but, just a reminder that just because some prices look "strong" or "healthy" today doesn't mean that people didn't pay even more when the market was hotter.

Great page, right in my nostalgic wheelhouse. That said, I don't know if I want to live in a world where this page sells for $6K more than the Neal Adams Action #399 cover...

Yeah, it's great stuff, but, a lot of the old hands already have their examples and the newer generation seems profoundly disinterested. At least on a relative basis, this stuff is looking cheap compared to some of the '80s/'90s stuff.

I continued to be shocked at how low some really nice DC covers from that era, including by heavyweights like Adams, go for compared to Marvel art. I mean, in the real world, $25.2K is a big number, but, in the OA world, it's practically peanuts (not to be confused with Peanuts or P-Nutz) these days for mainstream superhero art from that era.

I can tell you that the Heritage catalog did no justice to this piece. Not that it's Heritage's fault, it's just that, in person, it has a presence/wall power that just cannot be captured in a photo. It is just stunning, easily the most beautiful piece of comic art that I have seen in years. I kept coming back to look at it over and over and over again at SDCC. I had initially planned to make a serious run at this, but, I am an example of what I said above - I'm not as confident at the moment that the art I would need to sell is going to get the prices I would need to swing a purchase like this. So, I revised my limit lower, and we've blown past that limit at this point. That said, it might have been a moot point anyway as it looks like it could blast even higher in the live session. My initial instinct when I saw this was this could easily be a Lucas Museum target (very likely the inspiration for Princess Leia's Episode IV hair-do) and that it could have just been unwinnable from the start.

Anecdotally, I know a lot of my circle of collector friends (and friends of friends), including some big hitters, have pulled back their buying this year and there's been a lot more "selling art to buy art" vs. tapping the bank/investment accounts. Which gets us to a crucial talking point: if you're not as confident that the art you need to sell is going to fetch the price you want so you can buy something else, well, you may just stay on the sidelines rather than take that chance. This would also explain why the number of lots with reserves seems to have spiked higher. And seeing some of those lots (Frazetta Death Dealer, Iron Fist #15 page) go RNM yesterday (let's see how the Bolland Batman page fares today) could dent confidence further. Speaking of the Death Dealer, I'm not surprised that it went RNM. Why? Because when it sold the first time around, it came from a Frazetta family member and Heritage is going to make sure the family gets taken care of. While I'm sure it was a big hitter who consigned it back, I don't think the same incentive was there to make sure it sold this time around.

In all seriousness, I think it's pretty clear that we're now 12-18 months past the "everything is going up" phase of the market when there was a ton of indiscriminate YOLO and FOMO buying going on by both newer and veteran collectors alike, just grabbing everything they could before prices went even higher. My working hypothesis is that a lot of people probably overspent their budgets (pulling forward future demand) at very high price points for art during this time, which is why OA has been generally flat-to-down this year even though other risk assets have generally been pretty frothy to the upside. The net result of which is that OA collectors have become far more focused in their buying, which is why we keep hearing more stories about people who might have ordinarily bid, now holding back for certain pieces that would surely have fetched more in, say, late 2021 or early 2022. To be sure, there is still a lot of money sloshing around out there, so, some pieces will still be going gangbusters, but, at this point, that a general market correction is happening is pretty much settled science.

LOL, I wouldn't describe the BWS Conan market as "dead", but, a lot of the prices definitely haven't even kept up with CPI over the past few years while mainstream Marvel art has enjoyed some of its best years ever. And, aside from a couple/few outlier sales, it's not like prices were tearing it up before then either. And, sure, if the best BWS Conan material ever hit the market, people would of course go nuts over it, but, there were people who would have been willing to pay a "future price" a decade ago as well. That stuff would go for more now, of course, but, I think it's fair to say that even the best stuff would have hugely lagged the appreciation in the overall OA market from the levels where motivated buyers would have ponied up for it 8-10 years ago When I started collecting OA about 20 years ago, BWS Conan was one of the pillars of OA collecting. If Kirby FF was AAA-rated, BWS Conan was solid AA, investment-grade art that would have been deemed essential for a broad-based comic art collection. Nowadays, I'd say that it's the equivalent of a BBB-, barely clinging on to its investment-grade rating, with very few younger collectors caring at all about it. That said, buy whatever turns your crank!