New to this hobby - A few questions, mostly on 90s stuff 1 1

[npasto]

New to this hobby - A few questions, mostly on 90s stuff

Hello all. Been a comic fan for a while, but I'm relatively new to the original comic art game. When I was a kid I got some cool sketches on backing board at Wonder Con in San Francisco in the early-mid 90s (Jeff Smith Bone, Erik Larsen Savage Dragon stuff, Sergio Aragones Groo), but that was my only original art for many years. I've been going to SDCC since 2013 and I've gradually become more interested in buying pages. In 2015 I saw Stan Sakai offering $80 sketches at SDCC and opted not to get one. Kind of regretted it all year. In 2016 when I had another chance, I plunked down $80 and got something that looked kind of like this:

 

 

I was a little bit disappointed that the quality wasn't on par with the art from his published comics, but I'm still glad to have the piece and I guess for $80 you can't expect a masterwork. Anyway, that got me started buying more stuff. I got a cool Dragon commission from Erik Larsen at another event a while back and recently bought my first actual page: a splash from a new Image series that I like.

 

I admire some of the old artists like Jack Kirby, but they're way out of my price range, and since I don't read or collect Marvel/DC Comics and didn't grow up in that time period, the old stuff isn't too meaningful for me. I'm more interested in stuff from the 90s to today. Dark Horse Legend/Image Comics mostly. With that in mind, I have a few questions related to my "wish list". Any help would be appreciated, as I don't have a great frame of reference.

 

1. What would be a reasonable price for a Savage Dragon cover or splash page? I'd be interested in current stuff, but might prefer something from the first 100 issues. I saw the cover for #60 listed for $3000, but haven't seen much else out there.

 

2. What would be a reasonable price for Mike Allred Madman covers / splashes / panels? What about Stan Sakai Usagi stuff? I like Mignola Hellboy as well, but that seems a bit out of my price range at the moment.

 

3. Not a 90s guy, but does Jason Latour ever sell original art? I like his stuff on Southern Bastards a lot, but it seems like it's not out there for sale anywhere. Are a lot of current artists holding onto their inventory because they've seen how some of the old stuff from people like Kirby, Miller, and McFarlane has skyrocketed?

 

Thanks in advance.

Edited April 20, 2017 by npasto

[mister_not_so_nice]

34 minutes ago, npasto said:

 

1. What would be a reasonable price for a Savage Dragon cover or splash page? I'd be interested in current stuff, but might prefer something from the first 100 issues. I saw the cover for #60 listed for $3000, but haven't seen much else out there.

 

2. What would be a reasonable price for Mike Allred Madman covers / splashes / panels? What about Stan Sakai Usagi stuff? I like Mignola Hellboy as well, but that seems a bit out of my price range at the moment.

1. You can get SAVAGE DRAGON direct from the artist, so I'm guessing his asking price would be the reasonable price. No dealer or evil rep mark-up prices.  HOWEVER, he likes to sell his art as complete books, so I think that accounts for the lack of pages 'in the wild.'  It takes a special kind of heartless collector to be the first one to scatter a book. 

2. @alex_johnson will probably be along to post his pricing guidelines, but until then you may find them tucked in the NEW TO OA COLLECTING thread

[John E.]

That $80 Sakai piece is pretty sad. You are better off plunking down $250 on one of his unpublished "pin-ups." You can find them on eBay, too--just wait for a quality one to pop up.

Albert Moy is Erik Larsen's art rep. Have you been to his site and looked for SD art there? Erik Larsen is a Bay Area resident so I've met him plenty o'times and he brings a stack of art with him. He does not price to move. Covers run around $3K+ and splashes $1K-$2K. Panel pages are around $300+. I remember one page on 11x17 paper of Dragon descending into the ocean. It was a lone figure about 2 inches long with bubbles coming out of his mouth, no background. That was $100 and as cheap as it gets. Like Mr NSN stated, and Erik has told me this himself, Erik mostly sells complete books. I would ask Albert Moy if he can request a stack of art from Erik as I don't think Erik wants to bother with packing and shipping art. He is fan friendly and a gentleman so maybe it wouldn't hurt to ask. His new art really large by the way, larger than 11x17. It's at least 12x19, maybe bigger.

Allred Madman covers don't pop up often, not from his direct series anyway. Recently, two covers with Madman on it popped up. One was from a board member here and it was a TPB cover. His asking price was $1500 OBO and I believe it sold on an offer. The other was the cover of a Dark Horse Annual. That sold for $1500. If you search Comic Art Fans you'll find a dealer selling a later Madman cover for about $2500 and and, I think, and Atomics cover for $2000. This month on ComicLink a Madman splash from #2(?) (Dark Horse run) sold for $1100. Madman was the central figure, but not the dominant one. A nice Madman cover or splash is on top of my want list so know that you'll have healthy competition. Simon M. at Gotsuperpowers.com is Mike's dealer and he can help you.

I can't confirm this, but Latour is probably all digital.

[npasto]

18 minutes ago, Jay Olie Espy said:

That $80 Sakai piece is pretty sad. You are better off plunking down $250 on one of his unpublished "pin-ups." You can find them on eBay, too--just wait for a quality one to pop up.

Albert Moy is Erik Larsen's art rep. Have you been to his site and looked for SD art there? Erik Larsen is a Bay Area resident so I've met him plenty o'times and he brings a stack of art with him. He does not price to move. Covers run around $3K+ and splashes $1K-$2K. Panel pages are around $300+. I remember one page on 11x17 paper of Dragon descending into the ocean. It was a lone figure about 2 inches long with bubbles coming out of his mouth, no background. That was $100 and as cheap as it gets. Like Mr NSN stated, and Erik has told me this himself, Erik mostly sells complete books. I would ask Albert Moy if he can request a stack of art from Erik as I don't think Erik wants to bother with packing and shipping art. He is fan friendly and a gentleman so maybe it wouldn't hurt to ask. His new art really large by the way, larger than 11x17. It's at least 12x19, maybe bigger.

Allred Madman covers don't pop up often, not from his direct series anyway. Recently, two covers with Madman on it popped up. One was from a board member here and it was a TPB cover. His asking price was $1500 OBO and I believe it sold on an offer. The other was the cover of a Dark Horse Annual. That sold for $1500. If you search Comic Art Fans you'll find a dealer selling a later Madman cover for about $2500 and and, I think, and Atomics cover for $2000. This month on ComicLink a Madman splash from #2(?) (Dark Horse run) sold for $1100. Madman was the central figure, but not the dominant one. A nice Madman cover or splash is on top of my want list so know that you'll have healthy competition. Simon M. at Gotsuperpowers.com is Mike's dealer and he can help you.

I can't confirm this, but Latour is probably all digital.

Thanks for the reply. I did indeed look at the Albert Moy site. It's a bit unwieldy with very slow loading times, but it at least gave me a rough idea of the price ranges for the various books and types of pages. I listened to a Felix Comic Art Podcast with Erik from last year and I think he mentioned that he likes to sell the comics whole and not page-by-page, which makes sense when there are so many issues of the book to deal with. I guess I can contact him or his rep to get a better idea of the pricing.

 

Appreciate the Madman tips. I saw a pretty cool title page that went for about $1100 on auction recently, so I guess that's another data point. For Madman I'd probably be content just owning a panel page from the original Madman series or the Dark Horse series, so I might go that route for now instead of paying a lot (for me) for a cover.

 

I have seen Latour sketches floating around on the Internet, but don't know where to buy. Stuff like this:

 

And this:

 

 

And this:

 

Seems from his recent posts that he doesn't necessarily love to sketch at Cons, as it takes away time/energy from making actual comics. I don't know anything about his process, and whether he uses standard paper/inks or does a lot of the lines on computer, so I guess I don't know if physical Southern Bastards pages even exist anywhere.

Edited April 20, 2017 by npasto

[npasto]

21 minutes ago, Jay Olie Espy said:

That $80 Sakai piece is pretty sad. You are better off plunking down $250 on one of his unpublished "pin-ups." You can find them on eBay, too--just wait for a quality one to pop up.

 

 

And yea, this is so true! Not trying to "put him on blast" because he's a great artist and I like his work a lot, but I was a bit surprised to see what my $80 got me. Looking around the Internet, it seems like there are a lot of similar sketches out there. They don't look like his art from the books. I guess $80 is a small price to pay for an important lesson: do your homework before you put your money on the table.

[John E.]

We all learn that lesson the hard way and pretty early. Don't worry about it and move on. 

We must both be referring to the same Madman splash that just ended on ComicLink. I've noticed that the last few ComicLink auctions have had Madman pages, so keep checking there. Those have been running at $375+, depending on the quality of the page.

[GotSuperPowers?]

@npasto, I have Allred Madman art that isn't on the site, so feel free to reach out to me with what you might be looking for and I'll be happy to help.  I can to time payments too, if that helps.

Best

Simon

[artistlost]

From what I know Latour does pages as small sketches (traditional and digital) here and there and then finishes/composes the pages digitally so no real art pages exist. He also is VERY hard to get a reply out of from what I have found about buying anything even small scraps and doodles. As already mentioned, he doesn't sketch at shows and rarely does commissions.

 

mathew

[Eltanin]

Stan Sakai doesn't sell the published pages from Usagi Yojimbo. However, you can buy either published covers (around 2.5k$, can be more if the cover is from the beginning of the series or particularly beautiful), or rejected interior pages (prices vary, one very early rejected splah page sold for more than 3k$ on Heritage, for example). There are also prelim covers (not published) which are cheaper than the final version.

Stan sometimes accepts to do commissions to be picked at a convention, if his schedule allows it.

I got this in 2015 for 300euros, which I picked up during his visit at the Lucca convention. I contacted him one month in advance.

http://www.2dgalleries.com/art/usagi-yojimbo-commission-boys-day-57031

 

As for Jason Latour, I've heard he doesn't do sketches often in conventions, and he just confirmed on twitter that he would not sketch at C2E2, for example. But it does happen sometimes if one's lucky.

Below is a sketch he did for me during a french convention. The french publisher organized a lottery to win a free sketch by Jason Latour. I got lucky:

http://www.2dgalleries.com/art/southern-bastards-par-jason-latour-63358

 

Edited April 20, 2017 by Eltanin

[npasto]

8 hours ago, GotSuperPowers? said:

@npasto, I have Allred Madman art that isn't on the site, so feel free to reach out to me with what you might be looking for and I'll be happy to help.  I can to time payments too, if that helps.

Best

Simon

Thanks! Bookmarked your site and will reach out at some point.

[npasto]

5 hours ago, artistlost said:

From what I know Latour does pages as small sketches (traditional and digital) here and there and then finishes/composes the pages digitally so no real art pages exist. He also is VERY hard to get a reply out of from what I have found about buying anything even small scraps and doodles. As already mentioned, he doesn't sketch at shows and rarely does commissions.

 

mathew

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

[npasto]

2 hours ago, Eltanin said:

Stan Sakai doesn't sell the published pages from Usagi Yojimbo. However, you can buy either published covers (around 2.5k$, can be more if the cover is from the beginning of the series or particularly beautiful), or rejected interior pages (prices vary, one very early rejected splah page sold for more than 3k$ on Heritage, for example). There are also prelim covers (not published) which are cheaper than the final version.

Stan sometimes accepts to do commissions to be picked at a convention, if his schedule allows it.

I got this in 2015 for 300euros, which I picked up during his visit at the Lucca convention. I contacted him one month in advance.

http://www.2dgalleries.com/art/usagi-yojimbo-commission-boys-day-57031

 

As for Jason Latour, I've heard he doesn't do sketches often in conventions, and he just confirmed on twitter that he would not sketch at C2E2, for example. But it does happen sometimes if one's lucky.

Below is a sketch he did for me during a french convention. The french publisher organized a lottery to win a free sketch by Jason Latour. I got lucky:

http://www.2dgalleries.com/art/southern-bastards-par-jason-latour-63358

 

Thanks.

 

Nice pieces!

[Bird]

Simon facilitated an awesome commission from Mike Allred for me. It is the craziest idea I ever spent money on and only Mike Allred could do it right!

 

[Flambit]

Yeah, that sketch is a bit of a bummer.   Especially when guys like Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez will do fantastic little sketches for free at SDCC.  

[SquareChaos]

Stan has gone through a brutal past decade - I know many are aware of it, it became pretty public due to a few fundraisers to help out, but the short story for those that don't know is that his wife battled cancer for a decade before finally succumbing in 2014. I can only imagine the financial drain (let alone every other type of drain) they must have experienced over that time.

And I do certainly understand that it is a big let down to shell out hard earned money and get back something that isn't up to the level you were expecting, so I can sympathize with that. Though from my perspective, that isn't a bad little sketch, but I'm sure it would have felt like a better overall experience if it had cost $25 instead of $80. 

[npasto]

Geeze, now I feel a bit guilty for even mentioning it.

[SquareChaos]

10 minutes ago, npasto said:

Geeze, now I feel a bit guilty for even mentioning it.

I didn't mention it to make you feel bad - sorry about that, and you really shouldn't feel bad, your reaction is completely understandable.

I just wanted to give some context to people who may not have known the backstory, a little context can make you view things in a totally different light.

[MHoes]

On 4/20/2017 at 6:44 AM, npasto said:

What would be a reasonable price for ...

You could choose to become a (paid) 'Comic Art Fans' Premium Member, so you have access to their 'Market Data Sales History' and 'Dealer Market Data', which gives some insight into what pieces sold for at auction houses/eBay, as well as what some dealers had their art priced at when it was sold (although that doesn't necessarily mean the dealers always sold those at the asking prices).