DALLAS, TX.- In writer-director M. Night Shyamalan 2000 film Unbreakable, comic-art gallery owner Elijah Price flinched when a would-be buyer said he was buying a valuable, vintage original for his 4-year-old son. “You must think this is a toy store,” Samuel L. Jackson’s character snarled at the customer before correcting his misconception.
“This is an art gallery, my friend,” Elijah told the man. “This is piece of art. Its value will triple every year. This piece is to be treasured, to be cherished, to be coveted by every single one of your banker friends that think they’re better than you.”
That monologue proved prescient: The comic-art collector, once dismissed by the “serious” art world as obsessive fanboy, is now a legitimate curator of serious and respected art, which is as it should be. The works are the raw, handmade images that sparked countless kids’ imaginations, singular moments made to mass-manufacture for spinner racks and comic shops. They spark nostalgia, yes, but are also important cultural touchstones and, of course, the invaluable building blocks of now-inescapable entertainment franchises.
And many works of original comic book art have become as treasured and celebrated as anything painted on canvas, as evidenced by the $1.125 million sale of the very first published Tintin cover in June 2019. And just this year, Page 25 from 1984's Secret Wars No. 8, which told the origin story of Spider-Man's now-iconic black costume, sold at Heritage for $3,360,000. Art collectors across all genres now seek out the vaunted, valuable works of Jack Kirby, The Metabarons co-creator Juan Giménez, Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius), Tintin’s father Georges Prosper Remi (known by the nom de plume Hergé) or Don Rosa, the Eisner Award-winning creator of the beloved Life and Times of $crooge McDuck.
All of those, among countless other revered creators and creations, provide centerpiece offerings in
Heritage Auctions’ latest comic-art event, the March 11-13 International Original Art and Anime Signature® Auction. This is a genre-sweeping, globe-trotting event offering collectors another extraordinary opportunity to own some of the most significant and transcendent works in all of comicdom and mangadom.
Among them: Hergé’s Tintin Family illustration from 1955, made as a Christmas gift in December and described by Olivier Delflas, Heritage’s Director of International Comic Art, as a “sublime treasure.”
Signed by the artist, this stunning, playful piece is a family portrait featuring his beloved creations: Professor Calculus and the rocket from Destination Moon, Thompson and the mushroom from the The Shooting Star, Thomson and the Arumbaya idol from the Broken Ear, Captain Haddock and the Unicorn from the Secret of the Unicorn, Snowy and the scepter from King Ottokar's Sceptre and, of course, Tintin and the submarine from the Red Rackham's Treasure.
Heritage is also very proud and thrilled to bring to market for the very first time several works by the revered Argentine comic book writer and artist Juan Giménez, who in 1992 joined filmmaker and artist Alejandro Jodorowsky to introduce The Metabarons, oft-referred to as a fierce, celestial clan of warriors. So impactful was this title that Simon & Schuster would later publish Deconstructing the Metabarons, which described the work as “the seminal science-fiction graphic novel [that] has become the cornerstone of the Jodoverse.”
From that very first issue of The Metabarons come two pages not likely to appear again at auction any time soon – Page 14 and Page 33, which look less like comic-book art and more like detailed, almost three-dimensional storyboards for a stunning film set in a cold mechanized future. In these works, you can see what Warren Ellis meant when he gushed that “what keeps me going back to The Metabarons is the immense volume and speed of its innovation. There is literally a new and mad idea on every page.”
Pages that, until now, that have never before come to market.
It’s worth noting, too, that The Metabarons sprang from an idea first concocted in 1989 by Jodorowsky and the man called Moebius, who is always a star of Heritage Auctions’ International Comic Art events. This auction is no different, as the artist is represented here by that very event that spawned The Metabarons in the form of the cover to July 1988’s Incal I: The Dark Incal & The Bright Incal.
As its acolytes often note, this is a triumphant work – perhaps one of the best-known European comics to makes its way to the States and far beyond. The story is simple enough to describe in broad strokes – “In the distant future, lousy R-class private investigator John Difool receives the Incal Light, a white pyramid of extraordinary powers, from the hands of a dying Berg,” says the auction’s catalog – but its impact on science-fiction comics and cinema was deeply felt for decades to come. And this cover ranks among Moebius’ masterpieces.
Only weeks after that record-setting Spider-Man sale comes another page featuring Peter Parker in the black costume that later morphed into the alien symbiote called Venom. And this one, by Ron Frenz and Brett Breeding, comes from one of the most significant issues in the Web-Slinger’s run, 1984’s The Amazing Spider-Man No. 252, which actually hit newsstands months before the costume’s origin was explained in Secret Wars No. 8.
The issue’s cover, a black-suited homage to Amazing Fantasy No. 15, promised, “The rumors are true. Introducing … The New Spider-Man!” And there he is on Page 9, which is being offered in this auction, with Spider-Man carrying home a dazed Dr. Curt Connors (better known as “that mindless, rampaging beast The Lizard”). Connors’ confused son Billy speaks for the readers upon his first glance of the black costume: “That was Spider-Man? Gosh, I didn’t even recognize him! What happened? Did he get a new tailor?”
And from the publisher that had readers “Make Mine Marvel” comes another iconic work, this one by the King himself: Page 24 from 1964’s The X-Men No. 5.
The star-studded work from Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman is from the story “Trapped: One X-Man,” which wrapped the arc pitting Professor Charles Xavier’s mutant students against Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants – and concluded the X-Men’s training sessions with their beloved Professor X. Indeed, this is the very page in which the teacher informs his pupils – Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Beast and Jean Gray – that they’re passed the final exam with flying colors.
“You've proven you can think and act for yourselves!!,” Professor X says in the final panel of this action-packed page. “Your training period is over!! Congratulations, my X-Men!!”
Congratulations, too, to whomever winds up owning this historic work.
There are other Marvel must-haves in this event, including Jim Starlin’s double-splash from 2003’s Marvel Universe: The End No. 1, featuring an encyclopedia’s worth of X-Men (from Cyclops to Wolverine to Rogue to Gambit); Joe Quesada’s long-awaited 2004 return to Daredevil with Page 10 from Daredevil Father No. 1; and John Romita Jr.’s Page 43 from 2007’s The Last Fantastic Four No. 1, featuring no less than the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer and Galactus.
DC is here, too, represented by what Delflas calls Joe Kubert’s “surrealist take on Batman” from 1996’s acclaimed Batman: Black and White No. 1. And here, too, are some extraordinary works from Enrico Marini, for both DC and Marvel, including his cover for 2018’s Batman: The Dark Prince – what Delflas calls “one of the creepiest covers on the market depicting Batman's archenemy, the Joker.”
Almost as terrifying is Vicente Segrelles’s original cover art for 1994’s Dinoland Series: Departure into the Unknown No. 11. “Imagine being transported to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, landing on The Land That Time Forgot and being survivors who discover a prehistoric world populated by dinosaurs and primitive men,” Delflas says. “You need not imagine it anymore, as this piece places you in the center of the action.”
And at the other end of the comics spectrum is this delightful page from Don Rosa’s 1993 Donald Duck & Company, the fourth installment in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Because, as Delflas says of this event, “There is something for everyone.” From everywhere.
