The Four Color Media Monitor

ArtNet's reported on the sales of portraits by a famous fantasy artist whose paintings were both inspired by, and served as inspirations for, various comic artists over the years, and the approach here to selling art is far preferable to how back issues of classic series have been sold to date:

Frank Frazetta’s painting Dark Kingdom (1976) fetched some $6 million at Heritage Auctions on Thursday, becoming the world’s most valuable work of comic book or fantasy art. It broke a record that had stood for three years—set by the same artist at the same house.

Showing a buff, ax-wielding warrior wearing a winged helmet, striding over human skeletons, with what appears to be a dragon’s tail wending into the foreground, the image has been emblazoned on prints, posters, coffee mugs, and T shirts, placing it among the artist’s most reproduced works, according to the auction house. [...]

Fantasy art is having something of a day in the sun. In 2020, Taschen published the 532-page, illustrated book Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, which discusses artists ranging from Old Masters like Hieronymous Bosch to Frazetta, H.R. Giger, and Boris Vallejo. A boom in film and TV adaptations of comic books has also led to a bustling comic book market, as Artnet News reported in 2022, with dealers making six-figure sales at events like Comic Con.

But the difference is that much of those artworks involving comics were monthly pamphlets, not paintings and portraits based upon them. And reading this news, I strongly believe if artists and publishers going forward were to borrow a page from how Frazetta's works are being sold on the market, we'd have a much better example being set going forward - specifically, if pictures based on comics were sold as wall paintings and portraits, not monthly pamphlets. That's also a problem that's occurred on the speculator market in specialty stores involving variant covers. So the publishers arrange for artists to do the artwork on the cover of a comic specially sold as a customized variant that could cost as much as $10-plus at specialty stores, but they won't develop these artworks as paintings for the wall of a house, gallery or museum? That's the problem in a nutshell. Especially if the pamphlets only wind up stored away in a vault.

So the important question is: when will comic publishers be willing to take the challenge of developing wall paintings instead of variant covers for art? Because seriously, whether old or new, nobody should be buying pamphlets as a way of owning famous artworks. Much of this would work far better as portraits for everyone to see on display in galleries and museums. When will they begin to understand the message? Frazetta's path is the better way to go.

Labels: conventions, good artists, history, sales