The market for original comic art continues to draw the interest of fans, collectors and speculators despite the nearly year-long draught of conventions, gallery shows and in-person auctions. Just last month, “The Blue Lotus,” an original painting by Belgian artist Hergé of his beloved boy detective character Tintin, sold at auction for nearly $4 million, and top tier artists in Europe and North America are seeing strong demand for their work.
To get a current read on the market, I spoke to Chicago-based art agent Sal Abbinanti who represents two of the industry’s top talents, Alex Ross and Bill Sienkiewicz. Both straddle the line between fine art and pop culture illustration. Ross is best known for his glossy photorealistic paintings of iconic heroes from DC and Marvel, and has lately branched out into other licensed images like David Bowie and the Beatles. He’s been a top name in comics since he rocked the comics world with the fully painted series Marvels in the early 1990s. Sienkiewicz is comics’ avant-garde expressionist. His energetic mixed-media work changed the look of comics in the 1980s with New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin. Both remain extremely popular with fans and collectors.
Abbinanti says today’s comics art market first took shape in the early days of the Internet, when the niche hobby of collecting the hand-drawn original pages of comic books, which were generally seen as disposable production art in the process of creating the printed comics, started reaching a wider audience. “Europeans had a much stronger appreciation for the original art than we did,” he explained, “so once they had access to American pieces via eBay and online auctions, the prices started going up.”
Ross and Abbinanti saw an opportunity to up-level the prestige and perception of comic art, making it more palatable to mainstream art collectors and non-comics fans alike by reducing the barriers to entry, including haggling with insular and disinterested dealers.
“At conventions, art dealers were selling pages out of Tupperware containers, on card tables, with prices written on the back in pencil,” Abbinanti recalls. To send a different message, he designed a slick brand for Ross’s work, including a custom logo, an imposing, white-carpeted booth designed to simulate a gallery environment on the floor of comic conventions, and staff dressed in sharp suits, in contrast to the usual convention attire of t-shirts and cargo shorts.
The booth maximized Ross’s exposure to both the ordinary fan market and to the deep-pocketed collector, including the Hollywood celebrities who roam the show floor of San Diego Comic-Con and respond to the upmarket appeal and ambiance. Noting the strong sales of high-end lithograph reproductions through collectibles outlets like the WB and Disney stores, Abbinanti encouraged Ross to branch out in terms of subject matter, applying his commercial-friendly style to pop culture icons from the worlds of film and music in addition to superheroes.
When Sienkiewicz became a client, his work required a different approach and a separately-designed booth to fit his own brand and aesthetic. “Alex is like Elvis [a superstar with broad mainstream appeal],” explains Abbinanti. “Bill is like Bob Dylan [an idiosyncratic talent with devoted fans and elite prestige]. You don’t want to group them together for all kinds of reasons.”
Artist Bill Sienkiewicz discusses his work and career at a panel at San Diego Comic Fest, March, 2020, in conversation with Rob Salkowitz.
As key comic and pop culture works by artists like Hergé, Robert Crumb and Frank Frazetta started realizing seven figures at auction, other classes of buyers started paying attention to the field and more money has been pouring in, pumping up prices. “There are different kinds of buyers,” says Abbinanti. “Some buy for investment. They take the piece and put it in a vault, because it’s a safer bet than the stock market. [Blue chip comic art pieces] are like Basquiats or Picassos now. They don’t lose value.”
Other kinds of buyers love the characters and are at a point in life when they have disposable income. Some just love the look of the work and buy on the spot.
Abbinanti says the absence of conventions and gallery shows during the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic has cut into those impulse buys that take place in face-to-face settings, but is offset by the savings in costs and hassles. Even though Abbinanti has been more selective about the conventions where he exhibits with his artists, he usually did several large shows in Europe, which compound problems of customs and regulatory costs with travel and exhibition expenses.
“We’ve done well,” he says. “We didn’t make as much, but we didn’t spend as much, and we have good relationships, which is 99% of this business.”
The enforced time off the road has given Abbinanti, who is himself an artist, a chance to complete a personal project that has been more than ten years in the making. His original graphic novel Hostage is based on his experiences travelling in Brazil in his early 20s, where he witnessed the intense and violent conditions faced by street kids in the favellas of Rio de Jenario. Abbinanti’s art style is dense and elaborate, reminiscent of the mixed-media expressionism of his client Sienkiewicz.
Artwork from ‘The Hostage’ by Sal Abbinanti, an artist who is also an artists’ representative for … [+] some of the biggest names in the comics industry.
Sal Abbinanti
Leveraging his own network of professionals and collectors, Abbinanti is self-publishing the work through a Kickstarter campaign that has already funded over 150% with several weeks to go. He says that channel is better for non-mainstream work that comic stores might be reluctant to put on the shelves.
As for the outlook for the future, Abbinanti sees no letup in the rising prices, with more money coming in from around the world. “Frankly, a lot of people with a lot of money sometimes have to put it into private investments like art, that hold their value but aren’t out in the open,” he says. “This last year, we’ve missed some of our European and Asian buyers, but they’ll be back.”
And so will their money.
Lithographs by artists Alex Ross, Bill Sienkiewicz, Sanjulián, Geof Darrow, Jeffrey Alan Love, and … [+] Eric Powell offered as Kickstarter incentives.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
