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Why is it harder to collect art from the 90s than it should be?
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91 posts in this topic

One of my collecting philosophies has been, "I rather have the option to sell later, then regret not buying now."

 

 

 

 

Not sure if the pieces I have to offer fall into the right category for you,

but I've PMed you about a few nice '90s DC pieces.

 

 

Best,

Gal

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Bingo, you hit the nail on the head. The idea that you had basically a kid version of Green Lantern teaming up with a guy on a skateboard wielding sticks. Plus you add Firestorm from the Amazing Spider-Man cartoon in the 80s and Speedball. It had the right amount of wackiness and relateability to it for some reason. If you have some Bagley pages feel free to show me! you can check out my stuff here: New Warriors

 

I only have one page.

 

I foolishly passed on a couple of others before I realized just how competitive this tiny corner of the hobby happens to be. That said, the page I do have is from my favorite arc, so if I never get another, I won't be too disappointed.

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did someone say something about hitting their 90's sweet spot?

 

I bet this one will go for a few bucks...

 

https://comics.ha.com/itm/miscellaneous//p/7141-54007.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515

 

This one is actually from 1999, from the 'Road To No Man's Land' arc.

That issue retold Batman's big moments up to that point.

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did someone say something about hitting their 90's sweet spot?

 

I bet this one will go for a few bucks...

 

https://comics.ha.com/itm/miscellaneous//p/7141-54007.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515

 

This one is actually from 1999, from the 'Road To No Man's Land' arc.

That issue retold Batman's big moments up to that point.

 

Ah, shows you how much i know, still counts as 90's at least! doh!

 

Thanks for the info Gal.

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did someone say something about hitting their 90's sweet spot?

 

I bet this one will go for a few bucks...

 

https://comics.ha.com/itm/miscellaneous//p/7141-54007.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515

 

This one is actually from 1999, from the 'Road To No Man's Land' arc.

That issue retold Batman's big moments up to that point.

 

Ah, shows you how much i know, still counts as 90's at least! doh!

 

Thanks for the info Gal.

 

 

I think it will still do well enough, since it is a splash pencilled by

Jim Aparo and does depict a 'important' moment.

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I thank everyone for their input and leads! It has renewed my faith in finding examples from the 90s with a little digging and patience with patience as the key word. It will still be hard to resist buying art from today's books as they tend to be aesthetically well-done, accessible, and relatively economically. For sure I was pleased to see so many fans and supporters of 90s artwork and the comics from which they came. I had a chance to browse through some of the personal collections and I'm jealous of how disciplined some of you have been sticking to a focus and of course, how lucky you got.

 

Ain't nothin lucky bout it sonny :preach:

 

But in all seriousness, you've got the essentials down: discipline, patience, perseverance. Have fun on your hunt!

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I have a few SIP pieces. At San Diego a few years ago, I bought two covers from Terry Moore for maybe $200. My friend bought me an early SIP page, and I suspect he paid just a few dollars for it. There is a collector I know through CAF who I think bought the pages from SIP #1 recently from Terry Moore who still owned it.

 

Back around 1996 I was at a comic con in New York. There was a dealer with two Dark Knight Returns pages for $1000 each. I wasn't really buying art back then and I thought about buying them but I passed. That was my biggest regret.

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As someone who collects mostly early 90s art I love this topic, and having gotten into the hobby in 1998 I'll chime in on my experiences collecting early 90s art since then. It likely overlaps with many other eras and the same experiences as others, but is at least a little more specific to the early 90s guys...

 

When I started collecting I wanted examples of the Marvel work by the Image founders and their ilk - McFarlane, Liefeld, Portacio, Lee, Larsen, Kieth, Keown, etc. This was around 1998-2000 and even then it was shockingly difficult to find some of it. Back then an average page was probably $200 or less for most guys not named McFarlane.

 

McFarlane surfaced here and there, but the great stuff seemed to jump by leaps and bounds constantly. A piece I saw for $500 in 1999 would sell for $2k a year later and then $3.5k a year after that. If you waited for the perfect piece or tried to be picky the market left you behind. That's continued to this day, with the best art leaping again and again at ever higher prices. When I first started collecting I recall seeing two McFarlane full page Spidey splashes sell for $1k/each on ebay.

 

I found only one decent Liefeld X-Force page in the first few years for ~$200. I'd been told that dealers had sold it all in the 90s at higher prices and the market tanked, so most people were underwater on that art and holding it hoping for a rebound. The NM98 cover popped up on eBay and sold for like $7k. I heard the NM87 cover popped up and sold for $10k. The XF4 cover I remember finding only after an ebay auction ended for $500.

 

Jim Lee UXM art was always tough to find and never seemed to appear. For years I was after a solid UXM page and didn't even see them for sale. A handful of the same pages seemed to keep recycling. Nobody wanted a DPS of Deathbird it seemed. If a handful of pieces emerged in a year it was amazing, and it seemed that more XM appeared than UXM.

 

Some artists like Kieth held onto almost all their Image art(but sold his MCP art), but guys like Keown sold off all their Hulk art long ago. When Keown pages appeared, one guy always outbid everyone.

 

On the flip side, Whilce Portacio art was readily available and consistently less than $200/page. XF and UXM covers were listed for $600-800. I remember the UXM282 cover selling on eBay twice for $1k. So it was around, just nobody was really buying it and pushing prices. Whilce had complete Punisher issues 8-9 that he broke up in the early 2000s. Scott had the complete #10 interiors still, that I believe are still owned complete by the buyer. Whilce still had lots of his art on hand.

 

So it depended on each artist where their art was and how tough it was to find. What I also soon started to learn though was that a lot of these artists had big volume collectors that hoarded like mad. A lot of those 90s guys did not produce that much work in the first place, so someone could stockpile pages of art by an artist and in effect own 25%+ of an artist's entire run very easily.

 

There was one guy who bought every Keown page that came out. There was someone who bought all of Mark Bright's Iron Man art. There was someone that got all the best Liefeld art. There were a couple of guys who loaded up on McFarlane art. And generally, these weren't huge pocket collectors with thousands of pieces, just a serious focus on one artist. I suspect a dozen guys ended up owning the majority of memorable and iconic 90s pieces broken nicely into 1 artist collections. Some of those collections are still on CAF to this day and never updated. Who hasn't run across Scott Wingo's 2005-updated McFarlane pile and not drooled a bit? http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryDetail.asp?GCat=4548

 

So that was a serious part of the problem - guys that loaded up and had no incentive to sell. People that almost seemed to view collecting art the same as collecting comics - you want a complete run.

 

Some of those guys still have it all. Others though slowly started selling and moving on in life. A few of those collectors went from buying everything to buying nothing to selling. A huge Liefeld collector unloaded everything he had over a few years and the market was suddenly flooded with Liefeld around 2005-2010. There was a point you could look on Burkey's site and see 20 vintage Liefelds from NM and XF to choose from at $500/page.

 

In the case of McFarlane and Lee things really changed when huge sales happened and the market shifted up. The Shamus Collection had a huge impact on McFarlane and Liefeld art at the time, and Jim Lee selling off a lot of his art the last few years has pushed his market up as well, and in both cases freeing a lot of hidden art from people that now found it worth selling. There seems to be a McFarlane ASM page in every major auction now, albeit not always top tier ones.

 

Some guys, like Kieth, continued to hold onto everything, but what little they had parted with - Maxx 1/2 - filtered out through the Shamus Collection on Heritage. In that case, it was a few auctions into the process, meaning many people were tapped out and may not have even noticed it since there wasn't a Maxx market to look to for comparisons.

 

Over those 15 years I kept finding pieces a few at a time, through all different ways, on all different cycles. There was a time where Portacio was easy to find, and another when Liefeld was, and another when McFarlane was. Some artists have never had one of those surges. Others have had multiples.

 

Patience was certainly the biggest part of the puzzle, as well as the luck of being at the right place and/or paying attention to auctions and dealers to spot the rare art, and most importantly knowing when to drop serious money on something special and either take on some debt or sell off some lesser pieces to fund it.

 

The biggest thing I often stress to 90s collectors is that they need to understand how little of this art there really was. This isn't like Kirby or Romita or Byrne where there are long runs and thousands of pages of art. For many, they did a small number of issues, 10-30, of which there were a lot of talking head pages and strange inkers or any number of reasons why there isn't a constant stream of A-list pages filtering out - they simply don't exist.

 

 

Edited by RabidFerret
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RabidFerret, this is a wonderful post with a great conclusion. Thanks for sharing and taking the time to write it. It reinforces my conclusion that if you see 90s art, snatch it up. Although I may not be following my own advice.

 

I attended the inaugural San Francisco Comic Con last Saturday. Keith Pollard was there with a thick stack of art from the 90s--mostly Thuderstrike, Blaze, and Daredevil when he had the costume change. Most of it was mediocre stuff--talking heads, or pages without any of the title characters. If you were willing to pay the $75-$100 for it, you could get an okay page with a title character engaged in a little action. At the bottom of this pile of "drek," I found a really cool double SPLASH page of DD about to face off with the Kingpin. I asked about the price thinking if he wanted something in the high 3-figures maybe I can work something out with him. His asking price? $3,000. Sheesh. I walked away with nothing, preferring to save my $85 and roll it over to something I really want.

 

I draw that many artists may still have piles of 90s pages that haven't hit the market yet, but like Pollard's inventory, a lot has been picked out. I also found out recently that a well-liked artist from the 80s & 90s has kept a bulk of his art because he doesn't want to undersell it. Is it me or does it seem like the artists from the 80s-90s held on to their art more than other artists from other eras?

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Patience was certainly the biggest part of the puzzle, as well as the luck of being at the right place and/or paying attention to auctions and dealers to spot the rare art, and most importantly knowing when to drop serious money on something special and either take on some debt or sell off some lesser pieces to fund it.

 

The biggest thing I often stress to 90s collectors is that they need to understand how little of this art there really was. This isn't like Kirby or Romita or Byrne where there are long runs and thousands of pages of art. For many, they did a small number of issues, 10-30, of which there were a lot of talking head pages and strange inkers or any number of reasons why there isn't a constant stream of A-list pages filtering out - they simply don't exist.

 

 

x2.

 

For a brief period, there was a score of Jim Lee X-Men pages available from wildstormfinearts.com back in the day. I still remember agonizing over whether to buy two Jim Lee UXM pages from my want list. The good pages could set you back ~$225-$300 iirc. Some serious coin. Finally, I bit the bullet and pulled the trigger and sent my e-mail or clicked on the link or whatever the site instructed.

 

And waited. And waited. And waited.

 

And wsfa.com promptly shut down within days of my attempted purchase, with no alternative to appeal, beg or bargain for the pages. This must've been in '98 right when Wildstorm merged their ops into DC.

 

Getting to a con wasn't an option for me. However, in retrospect, I probably should've bought a copy of WildCATS to get the letters page address and tried to contact Jim Lee's handlers that way. doh! . I didn't even think of that at the time. I blame it on myopia...possibly induced by repeatedly slapping my left eye over & over with a white-gloved Mickey Mouse hand.

 

Years later, both pages were eventually sold on ebay for even more ridiculously serious coin, much more than I could possibly justify for those pages at that time.

 

However, by following your strategy quoted above, I eventually acquired some alternatives to fill those gaps during some mini-surges...at the cost of even still more ludicrous coinage.

 

That WSFA fumble still burns. :pullhair: But at least I never had to buy a copy of WildCATS ;) .

 

So remember, kids:

 

- Timing is everything

- Patience can pay off

- It's better to be lucky than good

- Save your missiles for MIGs...don't waste your ammo on weather balloons

 

 

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RabidFerret, this is a wonderful post with a great conclusion. Thanks for sharing and taking the time to write it. It reinforces my conclusion that if you see 90s art, snatch it up. Although I may not be following my own advice.

 

I attended the inaugural San Francisco Comic Con last Saturday. Keith Pollard was there with a thick stack of art from the 90s--mostly Thuderstrike, Blaze, and Daredevil when he had the costume change. Most of it was mediocre stuff--talking heads, or pages without any of the title characters. If you were willing to pay the $75-$100 for it, you could get an okay page with a title character engaged in a little action. At the bottom of this pile of "drek," I found a really cool double SPLASH page of DD about to face off with the Kingpin. I asked about the price thinking if he wanted something in the high 3-figures maybe I can work something out with him. His asking price? $3,000. Sheesh. I walked away with nothing, preferring to save my $85 and roll it over to something I really want.

 

You really should check out what I have for sale from MY artists. They may not be Jim Lee or Todd McFarlane, but you'll get a good deal on some nice 90's stuff, without having to refinance your house to pay for it. :)

 

http://www.comicartshop.com/ComicArtShopsByCat.asp?GCat=3287

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I draw that many artists may still have piles of 90s pages that haven't hit the market yet, but like Pollard's inventory, a lot has been picked out. I also found out recently that a well-liked artist from the 80s & 90s has kept a bulk of his art because he doesn't want to undersell it. Is it me or does it seem like the artists from the 80s-90s held on to their art more than other artists from other eras?

 

Per my understanding:

 

McFarlane - All/Most IH, ASM, SM sold

Liefeld - All/Most NM, XF sold

Lee - Most UXM, XM sold

Larsen - All/Most ASM, MCP, SM sold/destroyed

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I draw that many artists may still have piles of 90s pages that haven't hit the market yet, but like Pollard's inventory, a lot has been picked out. I also found out recently that a well-liked artist from the 80s & 90s has kept a bulk of his art because he doesn't want to undersell it. Is it me or does it seem like the artists from the 80s-90s held on to their art more than other artists from other eras?

 

I'm not so sure about that. There are some guys who don't hit many conventions and don't have reps, so they still have some work left, and there are always stories of inkers having pages people overlooked, but in general I'd say that the vast majority is out in the world at this point.

 

Per my understanding:

 

McFarlane - All/Most IH, ASM, SM sold

Liefeld - All/Most NM, XF sold

Lee - Most UXM, XM sold

Larsen - All/Most ASM, MCP, SM sold/destroyed

 

This is fairly accurate. Most 90s guys unloaded their art long ago.

 

McFarlane seems to have a handful of pages left that showed up in his mocca exhibit a few years ago, or stuff he'd simply misplaced and found later. Liefeld has had random surges where he seemed to find an old stack of art or prelims and would list it on ebay, but it seemed more accidental than intentionally keeping it.

 

The one exception is Lee/Williams, because I think both of them were smart enough to hold onto a bunch of it. I remember a quote from Jim once of "I have the biggest collection of Jim Lee art", which we've seen to be true recently with all his Heritage sales. I imagine he still has classic stuff buried away, as could Scott, who seems to pull amazing stuff out every year for SDCC.

 

Edited by RabidFerret
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For a brief period, there was a score of Jim Lee X-Men pages available from wildstormfinearts.com back in the day. I still remember agonizing over whether to buy two Jim Lee UXM pages from my want list. The good pages could set you back ~$225-$300 iirc. Some serious coin. Finally, I bit the bullet and pulled the trigger and sent my e-mail or clicked on the link or whatever the site instructed.

 

And waited. And waited. And waited.

 

Oh yeah! I forgot about that site. It was the biggest tease!!

 

Also reminds me of where I first tracked down McFarlane's art - from his store, The Spider's Web, that still had a stack of picked through pages in 1998.

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The biggest thing I often stress to 90s collectors is that they need to understand how little of this art there really was. This isn't like Kirby or Romita or Byrne where there are long runs and thousands of pages of art. For many, they did a small number of issues, 10-30, of which there were a lot of talking head pages and strange inkers or any number of reasons why there isn't a constant stream of A-list pages filtering out - they simply don't exist.

 

I noticed this when I was making a list, some of these runs that seemed to make a huge impact are amazingly small:

 

Lee UX-Men (#248, 256-258, 267-277), X-Men 1-11

Portacio UX-Men (#267,273,281-286,289,290) & X-Factor (#63-68)

Silvestri UX-Men (#218,220-261,273) & Wolverine (#31-46,48-50,52,53,55-57)

Liefeld New Mutants (#86-91,93-96,98-100) / X-Force (#1-9)

McFarlane Spiderman (ASM #298-323, 325, 328, SM 1-14,16) & Hulk (#330-334,336-346)

Keown Hulk (#367-398, -368,378,380,389,394)

Larsen ASM 287, 324, 327, 329-344, 346-350

Valentino Guardians of the Galaxy 1-22, 24-27

 

What I also soon started to learn though was that a lot of these artists had big volume collectors that hoarded like mad. A lot of those 90s guys did not produce that much work in the first place, so someone could stockpile pages of art by an artist and in effect own 25%+ of an artist's entire run very easily.

 

I kind of sheepishly looked around and put my head down as I read this, lol

 

haha, yeh you guys had to go hog all the good stuff!

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