filmboyuk

Last time I sold a properly valuable book - signed first edition of Lord Jim - I used Sothebys. I think most of the major auction houses outside the comic space have regular sales of books, but I don't know if perhaps there are specialist auction houses that attract more focus from dedicated collectors.

I would also suggest using Vuescan to average out multiple passes, you end up with a much more nuanced scan than most will give you on a single pass.

You can see the signature auction premium in the CGC slabs - Sandman #19 error edition can be bought in a 9.8 for about $125-150, sold here for $1,560...

Good lord how long is she going to take to close the DPS?

Grades in - being this badly wrong takes time!

Sign me up please!

Is it possible for a retailer to pay CGC to send someone round to sift through all the copies and pick out those most likely to get 9.9 or above? Or to send them all in, and have them screened for 9.9 and above?

Just another thought - if the seller listed the art in the wrong category, maybe that is why Ebay mistakenly thought it needed to charge VAT? Might be worth looking closely at the original listing.

That is very odd. Sales VAT shouldn't apply as you're buying from outside the EU; import VAT might apply, but as you say, the courier company usually handles the payment of that, and charges it on. I haven't bought art from Ebay for a few years, but that does all sound quite strange. There may be two different issues (Ebay charging VAT and the parcel entering France) depending on how the original owner shipped it - if they didn't put the right customs paperwork on the parcel, with the right HTS code etc. then maybe the French customs refused to accept it? All quite aggravating, I'd imagine!

They were doing that at the same time. As was Stalin.

Thanks for sharing - that's a pretty good summary of it. The missing piece for me was the liquidity issue, useful to have that insight.

I'm in

Thanks - my guess as well, but it seems to indicate a flaw in their system - which should be able to accept one bid and reject the other, rather than accepting both - which might then lead to confusion (I thought I'd won the auction, as I'd bid the winning amount, all a bit disappointing!)

Question for more experienced bidders - my maximum bid (pre-premium) is showing as being the same as the winning bid (pre-premium) and yet it says I've been outbid on the piece. What did I do wrong?

I'm going, but it'll be the first time for me, so can't speak to how much art there would be. Looking forward to it though, lots of exciting artists (and writers) on the list.

I've entirely funded the purchase of several modern covers by selling high-ratio variants of those books once they got hot, which still feels a bit crazy. Currently taking advantage of the over-heated comic marketplace to sell a bunch of less key books from my collection, and so far this year (fingers crossed) the prices realised at auction keep surprising me (in a good way). Hard to imagine that there isn't some kind of a correction coming at some point, so moving into high value keys and original art is the plan - although I don't think the money surging into the comic market will continue on into the original art market, I'm just happy to be adding to my OA collection while I can.

I agree that there's always a price, never zero, for these kinds of collectibles. But those are extremely difficult questions to answer comprehensively, given the range of stuff that we're discussing. There are multiple potential drivers of art purchasing - practical factors such as price, access to cash (or credit), alternative options, etc. but also less definable qualitative factors such as nostalgia, perceived artistic quality, "historical" importance, collective competition, etc. Most of my purchases involve some degree of all the qualitative factors: I have feelings about the book, the art looks great, it's an artist I follow, will display nicely, it's a key moment for the character or the story, if I don't pick it up somebody else will and I may never see it again.... (and for one book in particular just because I've got so much of it that I'll hover up anything else I encounter at a reasonable price). In terms of older art, as the nostalgic driver would be massively reduced for me (or more likely entirely absent), it is hard to imagine how much lower the prices would need to be in order for the other aspects to still motivate a purchase decision. I often see pieces that are kind of okay, by artists that are perhaps historically important to the medium, but it doesn't really matter how cheap they are - because there's always going to be a Frank Quitely page just around the corner that I'll love more, and (sadly) there's a finite amount of money to be deployed, so I'm not going to pick them up just on the basis of perceived value. If that's a common position amongst more recent entrants to the hobby - that they'd rather buy multiple modern pages in the $2-5k range that they think are really cool, from recent books, than spend $20k or $30k buying a "classic" page by a Golden Age artist (I don't know what the pricing really is, as I don't pay that much attention, the range is obviously much broader than that, but I give it for the sake of illustration) then you might anticipate that the downward pressure on Golden Age pages would increase - possibly also driven by the increased availability of contemporary art, compared to the really strong older pieces that presumably seldom leave the collections they've been in for some time. (It may also be that when some of the larger collections are liquidated, the flood on the market will find very little price support as a result. And if at that point I can get a cool early Doctor Doom page for a good price, I reserve the right to change my mind!) But then I've also seen some new collectors try to secure what I infer are more "prestige" pieces by artists I don't recognise (Toth?), for which they are applauded by more experienced collectors who approve of their taste, so maybe it's just me.

To provide a slightly different perspective... My own interest has never really gone further back than books that were produced during the 90s when I was a teenager. A few titles that I read during the 90s - such as Frank Miller's Daredevil - were produced in earlier decades, but while I'd be quite happy to own a Frank Miller Daredevil page, it's not really on my agenda the same way that Sandman or From Hell pages are, so I'm never going to stretch myself to acquire one - and thus at current prices will never own one. What that means for the future pricing of those pages would depend on how unique or not my perspective is, and how many other relatively new collectors share it. It seems to me that truly A-level pages will always be important to someone, but a lot of the other material with rise and fall in value as demographics shift over time. I've been collecting for a few years now, and still have no interest in acquiring any Golden Age art - to be honest, I don't even really recognise some of the artist names that are regularly discussed here - and I don't see that changing. I totally appreciate that for some people the older stuff is really important, it's just not for me - and the very few things that I might be interested in are so far out of my purchasing ability that I've given up looking at it - heresy in some circles, I'm sure...

A rising tide lifts all boats... comics collectibles as a broad sector is experiencing a lot of interest and activity, so monoprints are gaining as a result. I don't think it's too hard to imagine that even after that tide has ebbed, there might be enough interest that it will remain a viable stand-alone category of collectible, somewhere between comics books and original art - a high value and scarce collectible, but not on the same level as actual art. The Jorge Jiminez prints are priced pretty high, IMO, which is why mostly only A-level pages / covers / key story moments have sold, whereas the Pepe Larraz prints are pretty well priced, so they all sold within a few hours of the drop. I'm sure all the artists need the additional revenue, and its good that they will have this avenue to go down in terms of another market for their work, but most digital art will have to settle for a second tier of pricing.

The Pepe Larraz monoprint drop a few days ago specified that they were "printed on Hahnemuhle German Etching 310 paper to perfectly recreate Marvel Comics paper" so I think it might be common that the "Marvel page" detailing is actually also part of the print. Which is kind of interesting, in terms of trying to simulate something that they transparently aren't. I find it hard to imagine anybody is buying monoprints and not looking for online resources as well, so surely the two main ones they run into are CAF and here - if not, and I've overlooked somewhere, I'd be fascinated to know! I've heard people say before that the younger generation hang out on Instagram etc. but surely it's much harder to pick up information there than CAF/CGC so they'd naturally gravitate in this direction? Maybe as a Gen-Xer I'm just too old to understand :-)

Nice pages. I'm a little disappointed to hear that the little sketch promised on the website is on a post-it note rather than on the back, for some reason. But I also like his art and would think about adding some prints to my collection at some point - still kicking myself for not taking one of his Thor covers that I was looking at a few years ago - it's just that physical art pages keep coming up in the meantime! :-)

It's back up

Pure and Applied is a well regarded framing store on Bermondsey High Street - almost opposite The White Cube - that does conservation framing. I've had good work from them in the past. Not necessarily the cheapest option - although I don't recall them being all that expensive - but I guess it depends what you're framing, and what level of reassurance you require. https://www.pureandapplied.co.uk

I think we're seeing a lot of convergence between the original art and the comic collecting markets, and mono prints ultimately form a mid-tier between the two - extremely high-priced collectables, but not as unique as hand-drawn / inked art. If that's right, it would explain why there is so much volatility in terms of the current pricing of mono prints. The comic collecting market right now is overheated, and I think we're seeing some of the spill-over from that in the monoprint market, especially around characters that have become desirable in the comic market (e.g. Punchline). $6k is an awful lot to pay for a very pretty monoprint, but if you've got an awful lot of money, maybe you just wouldn't notice - although in time you would expect the pricing of monoprints to roughly line up at a certain multiple of original art (e.g. 0.25x of what it would be worth if it was original art). My view on the prospect of future printing is that it's a bit of a red herring. Getting as close as possible to having a truly "mono" print is ideal, both for collecting and for valuation. But, as with the general art and photography market, if there were to be other printings (if the publisher decided to do a run of prints as someone mentioned earlier in the thread) the earlier printings would not only retain their value, but arguably increase in value as their desirability was underscored by successive commercial print runs.

Just received a Jim Cheung Ultimates cover, and it was cool to find this prelim sketch on the back: