Original Art Stories

The $50 Jim Aparo Cover vs the $10 Jim Starlin Page

A few years back I came into possession of a series of letters from artists to a collector/dealer, all written in the early to mid 1980s. As an archive it's amazing, letters and cards from Jim Aparo, Don Heck, Sal Buscema, Don Lomax, Murphy Anderson - it's a Who's Who of American comic book art. Also included in the archive were dozens of cancelled cheques showing how much those artists were often paid for their original art pages. John Buscema, Steve Bissette, Dick Ayers, Mark Bode, Frank Thorne - the list goes on and on.

There’s the usual letters detailing pages for the standard ‘Make an offer’ through to a series of letters from Jim Aparo to the dealer as they established a rapport and art, and money, began to exchange hands.

 While it’s amazing how cheaply art could be bought back in the day, what is more incredible, and heartbreaking in its own way, is Aparo’s admission that he “…appreciates the fact that (you are) interested in my art.” The covers that Aparo was selling back in 1981/82 for $50 a pop would easily fetch four figures on the open market, if not more, depending on the content. Adventure Comics, Ghost, Batman, Detective, Brave & The Bold – they’re all here and at more than reasonable prices indeed - click and see for yourself.

It wasn’t just Jim Aparo who was selling his art for whatever he could get. Gary Kwaspisz was also offloading his pages in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s for a fraction of what they’d fetch now. In this deal Gary offered to dump 150 pages for a mere $6 each, with room for negotiation. Included in the deal were plenty of double page spreads, and art from Punisher War Zone, Conan and many more. All pages came signed.

Romeo Tanghal also made contact and was keen on selling his Teen Titans pages. Inked over the likes of George Perez, these pages were on the open market for around $50 to $60 each, and as an added bonus eighteen pages of Jim Starlin art was thrown into the deal for a mere $10 per page. $10 now wouldn’t get you anywhere near a page of Starlin’s original art. In fact, it would just about enablke you to buy a Starlin book to see the art in print. Ifd you were lucky.

 And let’s not even think about the Alex Toth inked art that was up for grabs and the Mike Grell Warlord art that was also $10 a page, but only if bought in bulk, otherwise the price was $35 for each individual page. Still as bad as that sounds, consider that a dealer somewhere paid George Perez $20 a page for the entire contents to Teen Titans #1-12. Try getting that kind of deal today – someone is certainly sitting on a goldmine of original art somewhere, with some absolutely stunning examples of art by Perez, Aparo and many, many more.

The age of affordable original comic book has gone for good. No longer can you pick up pages, let alone covers, for a reasonable price, and no longer do people look down on comic book art as being trash. In 2022 the original painting for the first issue of Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns sold for $2,400,000 at auction. A Rob Liefeld page, featuring the first appearance of Deadpool, fetched just under a million in 2024. The most expensive piece of original comic book remains a single page of Mike Zeck art from issue 8 of Marvel Comics Secret Wars. The page, published in 1984, introduced Spider-Man’s black costume, which would become the villain Venom, and sold for $3,400,000, also in 2022.

And it goes on. It’s good money if you can get it. Not all artists will bring such prices though. Still, the art listed in those letters would still fetch you far more than you paid for it in the 1980s and even 1990s.

Next time someone tells you comic book art isn’t really art, just ask them to hand all of theirs over to you. It’s a great investment.

And that’s why people weep over these old letters.