An long but interesting read by Daniel Best about the $1 million purchase of a near complete Archie original art collection drawn by Bob Montana by Diamond Distributor’s Steve Geppi.
When art deals go wrong they generally go wrong due to the money involved. Virtually anyone who collects art can tell stories of paying too much for art, for being over-committed and experiencing buyer (or seller) regret. Most of those deals generally involve a few hundred dollars, sometimes a few thousand and the extraordinary ones can run into the tens of thousands. There are avenues open for recourse, but what can a person do when they?re owed a million dollars for an art sale and the buyer was none other than Steve Geppi? If you?re the family of veteran artist Bob Montana you do the obvious thing ? you file suit and sue.
The whole idea of buying a large collection like this seems to be self defeating. The value of the art is because of its rarity, but to collect on the value, you’ve got to sell it which would flood the market and in turn decreasing its value. That’s not completely what happened in this story, just an outside arm-chair quarterback, WTH! observation.
With a few exceptions, like “Peanuts”, it appears the market for
original cartoon art has tanked. Even works by masters of the
craft -be it ,comic strips,editorial cartoons,caricatures are selling
for half or even less than that, of what they were selling for years ago.
Archie original art is one that a see up for sale all the time.
Some good news from the Art market
An original 1978 David Levine of Ted Kennedy just sold for
$1,100 down from the $3000 they used to go for. But up
from the last two or three that I saw sold at NY and Chicago
auction houses for between $200 and $500