When Comic Art Met eBay

     For a little over a decade now the world of original comic art has becoming heavily supercharged, thanks in no small part to the creation of eBay.com. Before the internet and the world wide web ushered in the era of online sales and marketing in the mid 1990s, most things we bought were from at brick-and-mortar stores or mail order catalogs (i.e. Sears & Roebuck). Specialty items and collectibles like original comic art were particularly hard to find, because you had to find the very few people who sold them. Before the advent of internet and online stores and auctions people usually bought comic art at conventions from the artists themselves. Eventually some people who were comic fans began collecting the artwork and went to conventions selling their collection of original comic art to the fanboy market. Now the internet has seen the sales of comic art balloon since the late 1990s. Ebay.com is now arguably the world's largest original comic art marketplace followed in a distant second by Heritage Auctions (ha.com) and Comic Link Auctions (comiclink.com).
      Some artists still come to comic cons with artwork for sale, but many have made arrangements with resellers/agents to sell the artwork for them online. Many artists themselves sell their own artwork online and skip the comic cons altogether. This is at long last a form of liberation for comic artists and fans. Back during the 1960s and 1970s artists had to fight legally to get to keep their original art and when they finally did there was a fanbase who were more than happy to purchase their artwork. The prices weren't what they are today, however. Most artists made a very small return on investment selling their artwork at conventions. But, happily, it supplemented the usually meager pay they received from the publishers. Unfortunately, back then the only people who even knew that original comic art existed were the artists, the publishers and the super-devoted fans who went to comic cons. Fast-forward to the late 1990s and you'll find everyone who sold or collected original comic art started getting the same wise idea. We can now buy and sell this artwork to anyone on Earth with very little time, trouble or expense.
      It seemed that people who had never even seen a piece of original comic art before started becoming curious. Often these were comic book fans such as myself who almost never got to go to cons. The revelation of several pieces of comic art suddenly being available to us was almost too good to be true. The amount of comic art sold online has grown monstrously since the late 1990s. On any given day somewhere between 200-800 pieces of original comic art put up for sale or auction on eBay. Sunday night tends to be the busiest time for items beginning and ending.
     Original comic art has now started to become conflated with other types of commercial or illustration art sold at auctions. These different types of commercial illustration have been fetching prices that you would normally see for fine art hanging in posh Manhattan art galleries. This growing love and respect for original comic art is, in my mind, long overdue. It has come about largely, though not completely, because of the new relationship between the comic book community and the online auctions, a relationship that I believe has only just begun.