Heritage 2023 Signature Auction Review
After a long hiatus welcome to another signature auction review! We saw a wide, very well balanced variety of art in this auction, there was literally something for everyone. As a matter of fact that’s how I decided which specific pieces to talk about, I chose a couple from each age of comics.
Looking at the overall results, they looked balanced as well. Of course a few pieces will go higher than expected and some lower at every auction, but with this auction I felt prices fell right around where most would expect. In fact on most of the lots I was interested in bidding on, prices landed within 1 bid increment of where I expected them to!
When it comes to golden age collecting, any pieces that survived are special. In this auction there was a wonderful Fred Ray and Jerry Robinson Detective Comics 58 cover which sold for $270k and a Mort Meskin Leading Comics #1 cover with sold for $150k. Seeing these older pieces is always wonderful. There are so are so few that survived there simply isn’t enough for many collectors to collect, and valuing these pieces can be tough.
Jumping to Silver Age I will start with a great John Buscema Silver Surfer page from issue #7 which broke $30k. Surfer art is always sought after and it seems like every time a good Buscema piece like this comes to auction the hammer price goes up ten percent.
There were also a few amazing Wally Wood Daredevil pages that finished strong .These early pages are really beautiful and represent a wonder time period of Marvel art.
Moving on to Bronze Age art, we had a bunch of Irv Novick Batman art apparently from the family according to Heritage’s descriptions. There were several nice Batman examples which sold very strongly. My favorite piece of the lot was a Joker #5 title splash. A stunning example of the clown price of crime which sold for $16.8k. Looking at Marvel art a key Frank Miller Daredevil piece featuring Elektra sold for $40.8k which felt very reasonable to me even considering there are no actual Miller pencils or board.
An example from the peak of the Copper Age(and the medium in general) was an amazing and memorable Alan Moore written Swamp thing page from the peak of the run which sold for just under $20k. I absolutely love this page and it is almost in that “it belongs in a museum priceless” category to me. There were also a couple TMNT pieces, most notable a page from the the Raphael one shot which finished at $26.4k, most likely fueled by being the first appearance of Casey Jones.
Finally looking at Modern Age we will look at one early 90’s piece and a very recent modern piece. A very nice Erik Larsen ASM title splash sold for 36k, a piece I imagine may have sold much higher at the height of the market last year when prices on similar quality 90’s pieces were out of control.
The final piece we will mention is what I consider one of the strongest results in this auction, which was a Ryan Stegman Maximum Carnage cover from 2019 which sold for $28.8k! I don’t think many would have guessed at this cover selling for over $20k.
I always like to flag the notable silliness that can happen in these auctions and that award goes to a Bolland Batman #400 page with a reserve of a whopping $48k plus juice! Without even a great image of Batman, I have a hard time seeing this page selling for half this price in a no reserve setting, and this is coming from a major Bolland Batman fan!
If you can’t wait to bid on another auction, have no worries as Heritage has opened their international comic art auction the day after this auction closed. There are some monster pieces in it we will talk about soon. Until then happy collecting!
