Intro to Finding & Buying Comic Art

Now, this is a subject that might be a little meandering, but a friend suggested that I write a little something about actually buying some art. I thought about this a little bit last night (read: 15 minutes) and then decided to just write whatever popped into my head on the subject whenever I sat down and fired up the intartron machine to wordify for you.

I don't really put much forethought into anything. Sorry. Fair warning. If you want something that's thought out and really deliberate? Well, you gotta just look somewhere else. If I think farther than a paragraph ahead, you're getting the really REALLY considered & deliberate thoughts. Sorry.

So back to the real question:

How do you GET art to decorate with?

This is a question that, at first, I thought was pretty straight forward: "you go and you buy it?" but after the 2 minutes that I thought about it, I realized that there's thousands of other things that need to be considered before handing someone your credit card or a fat wad of cash and them handing you a thing that you hang on your wall. I realized that, in order to answer a question as simple as "how do you get art to decorate with", you've gotta answer about a dozen other questions.

(I'm going to simplify this a little bit and keep my responses strictly towards stuff that's already read-made for being hung on a wall like a piece of art and not some of the more creative things that I've been doing/thinking about when it comes to actual physical comic books.)

First of all, how much money do you have to spend? This is a question that's going to determine whether you are buying original art or prints. Do you have hundreds or thousands of dollars that you're willing to part with in the right situation? Then original art is at least an option. But if you've got $31 and an old battery in  your wallet to get 2 pieces of art to fill some wall space, then prints are really your only option.

Why do I have an old battery in my wallet?

Original art is stupid expensive. How expensive it is has a lot of variables: from the name of the artist to the popularity of the character to how important the story arc was to something as simple as which characters are on the page. It can vary from $60 for a piece with art from Joe No-Name that's got 'Random Z-list characters 1, 2 and 7 only" appearing on that page or it could be a 7-page fold-out spread by Bryan Hitch from the Ultimates for $20,000 (no joke, I've seen stuff sell for this much or more). So there's kind of a lot of range in prices. But it seems that most pieces of interior work are going to go for about $200-500 and covers averaging from $800-2,000. Depending on title, artist and characters.  But the point I'm making is that unless you're in love with Joe No-Name Artist or Random Z-Lister 3, then you're probably going to be paying at least a little bit of cash for anything that you'll want to look at.

Prints, on the other hand, generally run in the $10-30 range. Much more reasonably priced.

So after you've decided on your budget, you've gotta look at genre. I'm really only going to cover comic book art here because while my friend asked about original art in general, she also asked about fantasy art and I'll be honest, I've got fuck-all knowledge about fantasy art. I probably couldn't name a fantasy artist if you put a gun to my head and I have no idea what the supply/demand tables look like for that to even hazard a guess. If you've got any sort of knowledge on fantasy artists, feel free to post information in the comments section or write something up and I'll give you a guest-blog credit.

But for comic book art, you've still got genres to consider. Are you talking superhero or indie or crime noir or cartoon-style? Are you looking for just anything with Batman? Or do you really have an affinity for Ghost World, The Walking Dead or Peter Panzerfaust? Maybe you skew more towards old-school Archie comics and just want to get some of that Betty/Veronica hanging on the wall? Or is your mind in the gutter and you want some sort of slashy Iron Man/Cap stuff? Yes, @EverybodyILoveDies, I'm looking at you. But you need to start narrowing down what you're looking for and this is a good place to start.

There's also the question of if you are looking more for a character or an artist or a combination? Do you just want anything Superman related or do you just really like Gary Frank's art? Or do you like his art a little bit but love it when he's drawing Superman? I know that I have this stupid love for an obscure Wildstorm/DC character called Grifter. But I also only really liked him when drawn by Dustin Nguyen or Talent Caldwell. So when I started original art hunting, those were my criteria. I wanted Grifter art but only by those 2 artists.

Once you've figured that out, it's time to go shopping. But where do you shop? There's not exactly an "original comic book art" store at the mall and there's not a section in your LCS (local comic shop) for original art. But all is not lost. There's options.

A guide to the differences between different types of original
art that you can buy.

1. If you live close to a city that has a comic book convention, this is a good place to pick up some original art or even prints. Depending on the format of the convention, most times, there will be a section called Artists Alley where artists will be available for autographs, commission sketches or to sell both their original art and prints of certain pieces of art. This is a good place to connect with artists and consider your buying options. You can buy the cheapish print of a piece and have them autograph it and hang it in your front entry hall. Or you can get a commissioned sketch of whatever you want for a price. They will also often have books filled with their original art that is available for sale.

The thing about comic book artists is that, when they're working on something like Batman or the X-Men, they get paid a page rate to draw it, but they also get their original work back from Marvel and DC. Sometimes they'll split pages with their inker, since they do almost as much work, and then they sell that original art to supplement their income. There's a reason these guys are called starving artists. They gotta eat, man. So they sell their original art for far more than they were paid to draw it in the first place and you can flip through their books to find that one page that you want. Or in my case, the 27 that I want, the 14 that I could theoretically afford if I really pushed it, and the 1 that I need to actually settle on because the bank would send out a hunting party for me if I tried buying more than that.

When you take this route, it allows you to talk to the artist and negotiate the price a little bit more. Most of the time, artists do not price their art in their portfolios, so you don't get the luxury of seeing the price tag before asking. This gives the artist the upper hand from the first second of any negotiation. If they like you, they might start with $100 knocked off the price they'd quote to someone that they don't like. Not saying many artists will admit it, but it does happen.

Also, don't be reluctant to negotiate the price. Artists will negotiate and don't be too afraid to walk away if the price is still a little too rich for your blood. A few hundred or thousand dollar purchase price is always a negotiation, no matter what the car dealership tells you about their "no haggle pricing". You can always haggle if you're willing to walk away.

But the convention does allow you 1 other option that you didn't have before and won't have with the other options. Commission sketches. Sometimes a commission sketch gives you that original art feel without the original art page price. This also allows artists to draw characters that maybe they've never had a chance to draw before since they're often getting paid a page rate by Marvel or DC. Or maybe they just have a character that they really like drawing.



Sorry for the shitty picture. I need to find
a better photo of this. It's also something that
I plucked out of the internet dust bin taken
6 years ago on a crappy camera. This was an
undirected convention sketch where the artist
was free to draw whatever he wanted.

I ran into an artist whose work I really dug a few years back and handed him my sketch book for a commission. When he asked me what I wanted, I told him it was his pick and to go nuts with whatever he wanted to draw. I stopped back a few hours later and, expecting a quick sketch for the $20 I paid and he'd given to others, I found a whole-page city-scape of Batman in Gotham. It was exceptional.

So that's a little trick for you. If you dig an artist but not necessarily their work on any character? Let them go nuts. They'll do amazing work for 1/4 of the price they normally would charge for a sketch.

2. Art dealers. Most of your bigger artists have an art dealer that they go through. Again, I'm just focusing on superhero comics here, but there's a handful of art dealers that handle selling the original art for some of the top-100 or 200 artists working in the superhero field. A quick google search brought up these 2 dealers:

Albert Moy Art    Splash Page Art

Unlike the interior page shown above, in this case,
the story was changed & the top (inked) panel was
used while the bottom half of the page was re-drawn.
As a result, it's a partially published interior page.

I've bought from both of these dealers and while you can't expect much in the line of negotiating options, they have a pretty good selection and will work with you to a degree on stuff that's been sitting for a little while now. They're total pros and treat comic art as they would a museum piece by Monet. They don't look at comics as some sort of low-brow artform and treat both the material and the art itself with complete respect. Bonus is that they also sometimes send out exclusive offers for cheaper works such as preliminary sketches for future works by their client artists if you're on their e-mail list. I might have jumped on one of those offers before.

Now as I said, you won't have nearly the same negotiating strength with the dealer online than you would with the artist themselves at a convention, but you can still negotiate a little bit.

3. Other fans. Want an older piece that you can't find through the dealers? Really want to find that double splash page of the X-Men vs the Imperial Super Guardians from way-back in Uncanny X-Men 275? Of course, you can try eBay but I'll give you dollars to donuts that you won't find it there. And you could try asking the artist or dealer who bought it so you could try to buy it off them, but it's unlikely that they'll tell you even if they have the records. But there's one place on the internet that gives you the best chance of finding that piece and getting in contact with the owner. Comic Art Fans is essentially a social network for people to show off and register (as much as there is a registry for this kinda thing?) their original comic art. And once you track down the piece on there, if it's on there, then you can try to contact the owner and work out a price if they're willing to part with it at all.

Comic Art Fans also has a marketplace for pieces that their members are actively selling. It essentially works like eBay's Best Offer option, and also has eBay integration for you to link to auctions on there. It's probably the best way to find and buy original art from people other than art dealers or the artists.

So that's about it. That about covers the rough introduction to finding and buying comic art. Thanks for reading & I hope this was helpful in some way. I'll try to replace a couple of these pictures with better photos when I get home since these were the only ones that I could find as I started writing this. (What part of "I don't plan ahead" didn't you understand?)