ORIGINAL ART TO SELL ,COMIC CONNECT OR COMICLINK? 1 1

[zeezee]

Hello fellow board members, I recently acquired a nice batch of original art from a collection. I am keeping the ones I like and selling the rest. For those who have had experience selling original art is there a preference or recommendation as to which of the two auction houses is better to sell them with Comiclink or Connect?  Any advice or opinions would be appreciated.

Edited January 12, 2019 by jzeze

[AnkurJ]

Depends on the art. But why not try venues that don’t charge anything like the boards here or comic art fans?

[zeezee]

1 minute ago, AnkurJ said:

Depends on the art. But why not try venues that don’t charge anything like the boards here or comic art fans?

Been selling graded books with plenty of resources as what to price them at,  I feel original art is a different animal altogether. My lack of knowledge as to their value and current market demands will lead to over pricing or under pricing them. 

[Dayzen]

I’d be interested to see what you have. A little research on your part may save you 10-20% in fees. 

[glendgold]

I've bought and sold on comiclink and HA.  Good experiences.  I'd try to compare them with comic connect, but I find their interface almost unusable for comic artwork.

Edited January 12, 2019 by glendgold

[Twanj]

If the choice is CL of CC, Comic Link.

I know HA does appraisals, maybe the other auction houses do too. 

[aokartman]

Since you are aware of major characters and publishers, and have your favorites picked out, it should be safe to cull through the rest to determine relative values.  If you have a dozen or more remaining that feature main characters (preferably in action), covers, title or chapter pages, large splashy panels, or clever story lines, then you should just get a 11 X 17" scanner and put them up on ebay.  You may be surprised at the results! 

Good luck with the project and don't rush into it.  Find out who the artists were and become as informed as possible about the context of the pages you have, title, year, writer, since that will improve your chances of finding the right buyer who can only discover the work based on your description.

David

[Pete Marino]

Start with heritage imo.  See what they say for value, see if they will knock off some of their fees.  If they won't, then go to comiclink.

 

[alxjhnsn]

Here's my standard answer on pricing comic art. It might be useful.

 

Spoiler

ou might want to explore the following resources

• The website Comic Art Tracker can help you find art and look at current asking prices for similar pieces.
• The OA auction archive at Heritage Auctions – This archive presents the results from all of their OA auctions.. Once you sign-up and get an id, you can search for pieces by your artist and see what they have sold for.
• The CAF Market Data - More auction results (more than 1,000,000) are available if you join the Comic Art Fans site, pay for Market Data access, and access eBay and other auction sites as well as Heritage.
• The Comic Art Database. It contains transaction records entered by the owners of Comic OA.
• Dealer sites. Dealers, generally, post their art with fixed prices though there are exceptions. There is a list of dealers on CGC OA board and the Dragonberry site has a list as well. The CAF site will search the inventories of several dealers for you. [Of course, Comic Art Tracker is better.]
• Blouin Art Info which tracks sales at major art auctions. It can turn up some Comic OA as well. Look for the “Art Prices” item on the top right of the screen
• Jerry Weist's Comic Art Price Guide - Heritage published a third edition of it. In my opinion, it's a good history book and might be useful for comparison work, but it was out of date a year before it was printed.
• A topic  on the CGC OA boards, A-level panel page valuations by artist/run - thoughts/additions/changes?, holds a discussion that relates to your question. It provides some "generally agreed upon" ranges for popular runs by popular artists on popular characters.
• The Biggest OA Prices thread tracked some of the largest sales in the OA space. While that particular thread has stopped; it's probably worth reading for the discussions. Meanwhile , the information is still being updated - just with a different mechanism.
  • The price information moved to The OA Elite blog. Click on the categories on the top of the page to see the updated list.
  • The discussion moved to Biggest OA Prices: The Blog.

New buyers and sellers often find that OA is too hard to price. I agree that it is difficult. However, I think that there is a valid reason. Each piece is unique. Uniqueness make art sales generally and OA specifically non-linear.

 

Examples of how piece can differ in ways that impact pricing include:

• Content: Consecutive pages could and do sell for radically different amounts based on their content. 
• Page Layout: In general, you might say:

 Covers > 1st Page Splash > Other Splash > 1/2 splash > panel page

However, that's not always true either. The right panel page can be much more compelling than a bland splash.

• Penciler vs. character: There are "A-list" artists, but not all of their books/characters have the same value. Kirby FF pages generally go for more than JIM/Thor pages which go for more than Cap pages (2nd run) which go for more than ...
• Pencilers/inkers combinations - Kirby/Sinnott FF pages rank above Kirby and anyone else on FF, but a Kirby/InkerX FF page might be more or less than a Kirby/Stone Thor page. Hard to tell.

Finally, you should join the comic book OA community. The three main points of Internet contact are:

• Yahoo's comicart-l mailing list
• The Comic Art Fans website
• The CGC OA Board

The main points of physical contact are probably:

• • San Diego Comic Con
  • New York City Comic Con
  • Heroes Comic Con - Not a lot of comic art dealers, but a huge number of artists who generally will draw and have portfolios to sell
  • Comic Art Con - A twice yearly show in northern NJ within relatively easy reach of both NYC and Newark Airport
  • NYC Comic Art Expo - only one so far, but more are promised; not thing but art people (dealers, individual sellers, and buyers) and a few local artists.

One last comment, if you are looking to buy or sell, spend the time to learn the market. That might take 6 months, but it's worth the time.

 

[zeezee]

13 hours ago, glendgold said:

I've bought and sold on comiclink and HA.  Good experiences.  I'd try to compare them with comic connect, but I find their interface almost unusable for comic artwork.

I agree with your comment about comic connect.

[zeezee]

Thanks for the advice I appreciate it. 

Edited January 12, 2019 by jzeze

[alexgross.com]

heritage worked great for me but i had a fairly high end page. i was told by some folks in the know that they were better than the others for original comic art. as a buyer i rarely use comicconnect. their website is awful. 

[Rick2you2]

I have yet to find anything I really wanted on Comicconnect. On the other hand, I do watch Comiclink fairly carefully and like the site. 

Heritage is excellent at commanding top dollar, but they extract top dollar for themselves too.

[Khazano]

Comiclink is great in terms of their premium auctions. Ive had stuff hammer for over what my asking price on CAF was, even after pieces those pieces had been sitting there for ages. And my returns usually land within the spectrum of what I expect.  The Comiclink Focus auctions are a little more shaky however, and Id consider that place a buyers market.  

Heritage will get you a better return. The fact that you can track, be notified via text/email, and the real live auction at the very end just trumps whatever  CC or CL does.  But between their seller fees, and the buyers premium,  they can gobble up to 30% of your final selling price.

Edited January 12, 2019 by Khazano