jaykza

2 hours ago, RabidFerret said:

Killing Joke as a 'book' is an A-list book.

But that does not mean every page is an A-list page, regardless of your finances.

If the best you can afford is the worst page from an A-list book, that does not make it an A-list page.

It's almost a combination lock, right? This page that just sold was an A-B page, meaning an A book and a B page within that book.

By comparison the Cap Annual piece that was posted may be a C book but a B page, so it's more of a C-B piece.

The Joker shooting Barbara page from Killing Joke would be an A-A piece.

You could even go a step further and include the artist as well.

Page 1 of KJ could be an A-B-A piece if you consider Bolland an A artist.

The Cap piece may be C-B-D.

And so on...

Agree with this. However, I find the letters ABC to be a bit imprecise as their may be a range within each level/letter. Just did a runthrough on some of the pieces from the last auction with a 3 category ranking (1-10). Obviously this is subjective but I tried to tie values to at least what the market looks to be rating each category. For a piece such as the KJ page, looks to me like whatever the buyer ranks the quality of the page would determine price it went at and this buyer rated it at least on the higher end of B (4-7). Anyway, it was a fun exercise for me to get an idea of why things might be priced a certain way and probably would help me to allocate my future spending.

Full disclosure: guessed a bunch on many silver age pieces because I don't really have a clue why certain arcs or runs may be important. 

12 minutes ago, jjonahjameson11 said:

I share your sentiment and your experience with this auction, Rob.

A few years ago, I consigned some modern art to an HA signature auction and broke even, give or take 5%.  Since a few years have passed since, I thought I'd give HA another try and see if there was an improvement to modern art sales in an HA signature auction, so I consigned some Bagley, Romita Jr and Keown pieces and the results were quite disappointing so I won't be doing that again.  Not to fault HA, because they did their usual great job advertising and promoting the pieces for their auction, but for whatever reason, the modern stuff ALWAYS does better on CLINK.

Live and learn...

Sorry to hear about your disappointment. I think the order of the auction has a great impact on realized prices. I hesitated to bid on pieces like your Keown because I was saving for a major piece very late in the auction. I ended up being the underbidder but if I had known I wouldn't be winning, there are a bunch of pieces where I would probably have made at least an extra bid beyond what it sold at, like your Keown. 

Think Heritage or any auction site would do better to place their more highly estimated pieces earlier. Not sure if they've ever experimented with such things.

1st post - oddly I'm posting to this one. Seems to me the strokes for the "D" and "a" are very different. On a legit signature, the D always goes downstroke, upstroke, curve. On the "ar" and "an" the legit signatures shows the pen is never taken off the paper and a single stroke transitions from a to the following letter. That's not happening on the questioned piece.