PhilipB2k17

They're nice. I talked to a sports memorabilia/card shop owner several months ago who brought out his collection of Frank Frazetta fantasy cards. Same idea. He wondered if they were worth anything. He asked me, because he knows sports stuff, not this kind of genre thing. I looked them up and they were mostly worth a few pennies or dimes a piece.

I'm fairly certain this event is going to get bigger and bigger. It looks like it was a hit, and a lot of fun. If I wasn't already planning to go to Lake Como this year, I'd have gone myself. I plan to next year. I will post a thread on Lake Como when that takes place. The artist lineup looks great. I just don't know anyone else who is attending yet.

If I collected unpublished stuff (I have very few examples), I can see the appeal of a verified QUALITY sketch cover by a name artist. That Artgerm is a good example. That's worth the money to whoever paid for the original commission. Some of the Frank Miller sketch cover doodles, on the other hand, make the George Perez one look like one of Perez's published Teen Titans or Infinity Gauntlet pages.

It depends on the comic. If it is a common, not really desirable comic, the grade doesn't matter as much as the art. If it's a highly desirable comic, then the grade matters.

The "appeal" is that you get an authenticated sketch/art by a name artist. It is witnessed, so if you later sell it -- there is no authenticity arguments. The risk is that the commissions, as you've shown, can be hit or miss. I seriously doubt Artgerm does sketch covers that nice any longer.

Nothing on this scale, but I recently won a page at Heritage with an incorrect story and publication attribution. It was a page from the Trigan Empire series by Don Lawrence. Granted, it's kind of hard for an American compay to keep track of which 1960's British Childern's adventure magazine published these stories and which story it was from. But I managed to figure out that it was misattributed fairly quickly. These stories are all published online.

I'm not posting my entries. But it seems to me there is a lot of sameness to some of the entries. A lot of Spider-Man or Batman covers with similar poses. Same with Harley Quinn and Venom. I should think those entries will cannibalize each other's votes.

$1500 to $2000 would be my guess. As others have pointed out, there's no signature Perez or Byrne characters on there, except for maybe Darkseid. But he doesn't carry the collector's premium that Thanos does. It's a really nice piece of art, however.

Or offset the purchase of a piece from the recent Heritage signature auction.

Aunt May?

There's an implied contract when you purchase from a dealer. You are paying them their asking price for what is represented. If they don't deliver it to you, or the art isn't what they represented it to be, you have recourse to take legal action. They are holding themselves out as merchants.

I don't doubt people have transacted art deals for large sums. But I suspect most of these were done in person where you can execute the exchange or buying directly from an artist or dealer. That's not counting auction sales. Of course, it comes down to trust, but for big purchases you should get legal protection if reasonably possible.

You didn't ask me, but I'd say about $5k-$7K. Interior pages are going for about $2K-$3k. Sometimes less. It's the title splash from issue 1. But it's Patterson inks. If it hits 5 figures, it's because it's the #1 Title splash (and a very nice example from the series by Bolland), but I don't think it has any spillover effect onto other pages.

I never said a contract existed. So, I'm not sure what you are talking about. But there are ways that a contract can be implied, or where you have induced someone to act in reliance upon your assurances, that don't require a per se contract.

If you paid me several million dollars consideration to do it, I might agree to the contract. As would Bouvier. That's my point. Your pedantic nonsense about how it requires two people to enter into a contract, isn't even worthy of a cheap law school exam question. The Billionaire has enough money to convince a greedy art dealer to act as his agent/fiduciary in procuring art for him. The contract would not have been to jump into a vat of acid or roll around in a pile of razor blades. If the dealer then acts in a self-interested manner, it's a lot easier to sue him.

I rest my case.

It's only ridiculous to people who do not know how contracts work.

Since I don't even have any 5 figure pieces, this is not a problem I have to deal with.

How much do you think the Omega Men #1 cover goes for?

Me likey! Brian Bolland and Bruce Patterson Camelot 3000 #1 Splash Page 1 | LotID #48001 | Heritage Auctions (ha.com)

"Fiduciary" is a legal term of art, and can easily be used a proxy for all of the other statutory or contractual, or common law duties you specified. When you are talking about a multimillion-dollar art purchase, I should think you'd want your art agent to have a fiduciary responsibility to act solely for your benefit and in your best interests, rather than rely on a particular forum's law. But, again, it's a matter of taste, really. How much layering of legal protection do you want to put into a contract?

You would think a Billionaire could afford to have a lawyer draw up such a contract.

Again -- you can enter into a contract with the Dealer to make him or her adhere to certain fiduciary principles. IN Real Estate, you can hire a Buyer's Agent, who only represents the buyer and is not also a listing agent who steers clients to their own listings, etc. The entre real estate brokers system just suffered a massive loss in a class action suit where they were double dealing and making buyers pay the commissions of the listing agents, rather than the seller. Unscrupulous people will manipulate any system to their own benefit.

Well, you need to enter into a contract with the middleman whereby he agrees that he has a fiduciary duty to act in your bests interests when he is doing the legwork to find a piece of art. In other words, you either pay him a commission, or a flat fee, and he agrees that he will not double deal, or conspire to defraud you -- and that he acts in good faith subject to breach of contract, etc.