Comic Art Collectors Census Question

[Lago32]

I had an interesting conversation recently with a long-time OA collector and we got to speculating on some census numbers as it relates to serious comic art collectors.

 

Just for fun, I thought I would throw out a couple of the topics of conversation here to the group for some additional thoughts.....

 

1) How many guys do you think play in the very high-end of the OA sand-box ($100-657k per piece range) I suspect more than one would think......10, 20, 30, 50 people??? And growing all the time I would imagine as more $ comes into the hobby from hardcore comic collectors and from speculators.

 

2) What percentage of the comic art collecting community (collectors, not art) is represented on Comic Art Fans??? Specifically as it relates to the semi-high to high-end of the hobby. 25%, 50% I know there is a significant percentage of OA collectors that will not post their art publically due to a perception of/fear of potential devaluation.

[mtlevy]

Set up a poll?

[DJRome]

Well, the way it's been told to me, more than 90% of everything produced since the silver age is still around today. CAF has only a small fraction of that, so I'd say your 25-50% guess is high.

 

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by high-end collectors. If you're referring to collectors who regularly pursue 100k+ items, you'll have a pretty short list. I consider anyone who can jump in on a 25k piece as a high-end collector, but that's just me.

 

For my part, I'm very curious to know how many collectors out there are good for a periodic acquisition in the 25-50k range. Anybody care to take an educated guess?

[Cbone3-migration]

DJR- Less than 5% can make a $25K move. Probably way less than 1%.

[MIL0S]

**Well, the way it's been told to me, more than 90% of everything produced since the silver age is still around today. CAF has only a small fraction of that, so I'd say your 25-50% guess is high.**

 

The original posters 25-50% estimate was regarding the number of collectors active on CAF, NOT percentage of art. I have a CAF gallery and I've only bothered scanning and posting a fraction of my collection and I'd wager that there are many people in a similar position. So just because you don't see particular pieces posted doesn't mean they aren't tucked away in collections of CAF members.

[Catwoman_Fan]

Well, the way it's been told to me, more than 90% of everything produced since the silver age is still around today. CAF has only a small fraction of that, so I'd say your 25-50% guess is high.

 

 

 

If it's 90%, that's very encouraging!

 

Does that hold true for DC too? I understand Marvel comics kept their artwork, but what about DC.

[Bronty]

**Well, the way it's been told to me, more than 90% of everything produced since the silver age is still around today. CAF has only a small fraction of that, so I'd say your 25-50% guess is high.**

 

The original posters 25-50% estimate was regarding the number of collectors active on CAF, NOT percentage of art. I have a CAF gallery and I've only bothered scanning and posting a fraction of my collection and I'd wager that there are many people in a similar position. So just because you don't see particular pieces posted doesn't mean they aren't tucked away in collections of CAF members.

 

Yes I think that's true. I'd love to have Bill Cox's access to CAF for one day to see what all is out there that is uploaded to CAF but not publicly viewable.

[jjonahjameson1]

Well, the way it's been told to me, more than 90% of everything produced since the silver age is still around today. CAF has only a small fraction of that, so I'd say your 25-50% guess is high.

 

 

 

If it's 90%, that's very encouraging!

 

Does that hold true for DC too? I understand Marvel comics kept their artwork, but what about DC.

 

DC doesn't count.

[Catwoman_Fan]

 

DC doesn't count.

 

 

Oh poooh...

[alxjhnsn]

DC doesn't count.

Does for me!

[lb jefferies]

I just did a super quick check on CAF and came up with 97 published pages/covers from John Byrne's original run on X-Men (even though when you do a search there are over 250 entries most of those are Hidden Years or recreations or sketches, etc.)

 

I thought this would be a good test case as almost all of this art was released to the market (I know Austin still has a handful of the uh .. nicer pieces).

 

Byrne's run was by my count 657 pages/covers. So almost 15% of the total is represented on CAF.

 

To me this was surprisingly high. Although one could call this test case flawed as Byrne XM run is very popular I would have guessed less than 10% of OA is on CAF.

 

Okay, lunch break over. Back to work.

 

 

[suspense39]

There is a lot of art out there in general, even a lot of good stuff, How much really depends on the collector ratio if there is 100 collectors and 1000 peices of art....not a bad situation for a collector, if there are a thousand collectors and a hundred peices of art, bad for the collector. I think it is important to factor in the amount of collectors as well. Golden age art is much more scarce but for the most part is cheaper than silver age, and now even a lot of modern comic art.

 

I was recently looking at my captain America volume one essential book, a really great way to see the art in context and in black and white form....and wow, there are a large amount of GREAT Kirby Cap pages and if 90% of them are out there.....pretty interesting. This is only in the first volume and not many show up on CAF.