Building a comic art gallery
Sharing a new addition to the collection
Editor’s Note: It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s New Comic Book Day and another edition of Amazing Journey!
The Amazing Journey column will touch on a comics-related topic, such as writing the first issue of a series, what it’s like to run a comic book store, working with artists, and how writing comics is different from writing prose.
Amazing Journey back issues
True believers unite (#1) | My comics origin story (#2) | Comic event series (#3) | The comics of Kickstarter (#4) | Single issues or trades? (#5) | From prose to comics (#6) | Adapting a celebrated fantasy series into a comic (#7) | Charting a career in comics (#8) | Comic book spoilers (#9) | Lessons from Kieron Gillen’s masterclass (#10) | Comics marketing 101 (#11) Designing memorable characters (#12)
Comic books are a multi-tool player: they tell a visual story, they look good on your bookshelf, and they are also a collectable.
One of my first experiences with the third item on that list was when I tried to buy the second issue of House of X back in summer 2019 and found it was completely sold out, with only the monochrome second printing available. And some shops didn’t even have that!
The next summer, I attempted to buy Strange Academy #1 only to find a crazy frenzy on eBay for the first printing. I eventually secured the terrific Art Adams variant at a reasonable price, but it too has gone up so much in price that I am loathe to actually remove it from its bag and instead got a copy of the trade as my reading copy.
I could spend the rest of this newsletter talking about variant covers (and perhaps I will discuss them in a future Amazing Journey issue), but today I wanted to highlight another area of comics, original art!
Yes, comic books are art and have to be created by artists. And I was surprised to learn that today’s comic artist professionals will sell you their art rather easily. In the past, when artists drew each page, there were physical pages everywhere you could purchase. But once digital became the dominant creation medium, that physical artwork vanished. So a new form was needed, the artist proof:
These are 1/1 prints of a particular digitally drawn page that are signed by the artist and often come with a remarque sketch. Once the page is sold, no other copies will be printed.
But because people still love physical art, at comic conventions you will find pretty much all artists selling commissioned sketches, illustrations, and sketch covers.
At NYCC this past fall, I had the opportunity to purchase commissions from two of my favorite artists, Stephanie Hans (DIE, Wicked+Divine) and Rod Reis (New Mutants):
That leads me to one last artwork to discuss, the sketch!
You will find many a comic artist on Instagram posting their daily warm-up sketches, which they will often sell. Chris Samnee (Fire Power, Jonna and the Unpossible Monsters, Black Widow, Daredevil) does a Batman-themed sketch sale on eBay dubbed Batober. Now, because it’s auction bidding, the price of these sketches can reach four figures.
However, Chris also does an annual doodle sale, where he lists dozens of doodles at a set price, no bidding necessary. But because it’s list price (and the prices are reasonable, the doodles go super quick, like within minutes of the sale starting.
Last year, I miscalculated the start time thanks to a poor time zone conversion and found myself sold out of everything. This year, I set a reminder to be notified when Samnee made any Instagram post, so there would be no chance I would miss the next sale. Thankfully, the stars aligned and my fingers were fast, so I was able to add the below sketch of Jean Grey to my gallery:
That brings me to the Question of the Week and your third chance to enter the July giveaway. To enter, simply leave a comment with your answer to any of the Questions of the Week from any July Amazing Journey post.
If you had an unlimited budget, what artist would you buy art from?
What I’m reading this week / Variant Watch
Big Game #1 - All of Kevin Millar’s characters from across all of his series team up to try to stop Nemesis. I enjoyed the recent Ambassadors series but admittedly have not ready any of the other Millarworld titles. Still, it’s drawn by all-star artist Pepe Larraz (who will hopefully be returning to a Marvel book soon), so I expect it will be quite spectacular!
Moon Knight: City of the Dead #1 - Friend of the ‘Stack David Pepose is back with a new Marvel mini-series that sees the introduction of Layla El-Faouly as the new 616 Scarlet Scarab!
X-Men Red #13 - Apocalypse’s wife Genesis is back and super-pissed off at the current state of Arakko! And it’s also Hellfire Gala season so that means a cavalcade of Gala variants! This one is a double must-buy: it’s drawn by Jamie McKelvie and features my favorite metal chimera, Rasputin IV!
What are you picking up this week?
Honestly the amount of modern variant covers and artists sketches etc causes my head to spin a bit. 😵💫 I used to by some for spec but it rarely panned out so now I just pick up variants if I like the art and some of my current favorites are Momoko, Frison and Campbell. I think I spelled all those right?!? Problem is there are a lot of great artists today which again takes me back to my head spinning! 😵💫 We’re blessed to have lol these great artists but the number of variants on some releases is insane but my daughter is an artist so I’m on board.