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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

On 4/17/2017 at 10:35 AM, Solar said:

lol @Dealers

 

eBay / CLink certainly don't discriminate against 90s art

While I have bought from C-Link, I do not consign to auctions.

I'm content to hold onto all this great art for awhile longer, unless one of my friends asks me to sell or trade to him/her.

I have sold a few pieces here and there, but privately, instead of at auction.

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On 4/17/2017 at 9:39 AM, Doc McCoy said:

Are they guarded by a dragon that will only allow a "dealer" to get access to them?

In all seriousness, if you know that there's a market for these pages, why not attempt to sell them?  Or encourage the owner to do so?  Why does a dealer have to be involved?

I'm the owner, and I'm not actively trying to sell them right now. I offered them to a couple dealers when I got the collection and both told me that it was art and that they weren't interested unless I sold them at prices below what I paid for each page.

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3 hours ago, Michael Browning said:

I'm the owner, and I'm not actively trying to sell them right now. I offered them to a couple dealers when I got the collection and both told me that it was art and that they weren't interested unless I sold them at prices below what I paid for each page.

I have to imagine at least a few PMs will set sail due to this comment.

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I, for one, love '90s art and so do most of my friends in the hobby. Mid-'80s and through the '90s are my prime comic reading time, but especially the '90s. I love when I manage to find small treasure troves of '90s goodness, but it has been a while now. 

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56 minutes ago, Madman1138 said:

I, for one, love '90s art and so do most of my friends in the hobby. Mid-'80s and through the '90s are my prime comic reading time, but especially the '90s. I love when I manage to find small treasure troves of '90s goodness, but it has been a while now. 

Mid-80s to mid-90s is my nostalgic spot, too. Another board member revealed that to me that that his collecting period. We must be of the same age. Anyway, I find it to be an unusual era to straddle: the respected copper age and the "wretched" modern age. Night and day. 

If you're in the Bay Area, Madman1138, will you be attending Silicon Valley Comic Con?

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19 hours ago, Michael Browning said:

I'm the owner, and I'm not actively trying to sell them right now. I offered them to a couple dealers when I got the collection and both told me that it was art and that they weren't interested unless I sold them at prices below what I paid for each page.

I think they're probably being a bit short-sighted and you'd probably be better off selling them yourself if that's the case, @Michael Browning (Whenever you decide to do so).  Judging by the responses here, there's definitely a market for them.  

While the 90's was filled with gimmicks and bloated numbers of books, the art itself is still one of a kind and definitely holds a nostalgia spot for many of us.

Edited by Doc McCoy
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10 hours ago, Jay Olie Espy said:

Mid-80s to mid-90s is my nostalgic spot, too. Another board member revealed that to me that that his collecting period. We must be of the same age. Anyway, I find it to be an unusual era to straddle: the respected copper age and the "wretched" modern age. Night and day. 

If you're in the Bay Area, Madman1138, will you be attending Silicon Valley Comic Con?

I was considering trying SVCC this year, but no, I won't be attending. I'm still a little bitter about them forcing out/buying out Big Wow Comicfest, which was my favorite con that I attended every year. So I told myself I wouldn't go, and was actually considering this year to see what it's like, but finances are just terrible at the moment so it's been decided for me. :(

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12 minutes ago, Bill C said:

The 1990s were an interesting decade to me comic wise, as 1990-1992 were some of my favorite years for comics. So many books that I loved were going- but by 1993 there was a sharp downturn, and most books (with specific creative teams) I was into stopped going for various reasons. 1993-1999 has almost nothing of interest for me.

Exactly! Could not agree more.

What I saw was Image starting the 90s with all this excitement and energy coming off great stories on X-Men and X-Force and Spider-Man, but the Image crew couldn't deliver consistently or with good stories, so the readers flailed.

Marvel and DC were foolishly trying to mimic Image and used gimmicks to try to regain readers instead of good stories.

So the industry simply lost those readers to other hobbies with better content.

Also likely why things like Bone succeeded, because it was the rare good story put out consistently.

 

 

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On 9/6/2016 at 7:05 AM, RabidFerret said:

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.

 

 

Great post. And yes, I'm very slow.

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My sweet spot is the X-titles from 1987-1992.

I think it is the same for a lot of people.  And I think that a lot of dealers/collectors realized that the stuff was too cheap and would would be worth far more when that generation started getting comfortable financially.

Allen 

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I offered the entire issue and cover to Punisher War Zone #5 drawn by JRJR and Janson in the CGC OA marketplace a few years ago. I sold off pages to a few boardies.  They flipped them a few months later. A well known artist also bought several pages from me.  I sold the cover via CAF. 

I kept the DPS and 1 other page for my private collection.

You snooze, you lose.

 :baiting:

Cheers!

Nelson Animated Ink

 

 

Edited by NelsonAI
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