We are taking a trip back to one of the highlights of the "serious" 1990s comic book auctions. This Thursday, I’m bringing out pristine overhead scans of one of the most historically interesting artifacts in our hobby's history: the 1994 Sotheby’s Comic Books and Comic Art catalog. As with all the early Sotheby's catalogs, this auction was chock full of incredible lots, including several truly iconic original art lots.
Using high-resolution, full-page scans, we are going to flip through this historic catalog page-by-page, looking for gems.
We are going deep into the archives to audit one of the most notable chapters in comic auction history. This Tuesday, I am firing up the high-resolution overhead scanner to take you live inside the printed pages of the infamous October 2001 MastroNet (Mastro Auctions) catalog. Long before the FBI investigations and the full-scale sports memorabilia scandal brought Bill Mastro’s empire down, this elite catalog played host to some of the absolute highest-tie comic book grails in existence—including the legendary, missing Detective Comics #27 graded CGC 8.0.
If you collected comics in July of 1994, you remember exactly where you were when "Splatt Mania" took over the industry.
Following the jaw-dropping $137,000 sale of a Stephen Platt Prophet promotional image at Heritage Auctions, I wanted to take a nostalgic trip down the "Road to Insanity." In this video, we dig into the full glory of Wizard Magazine #35 and the infamous "Extreme Wizard Prophet Contest"—where fans were tasked with trying to count every single flying shell casing exploding out of Platt's hyper-detailed, maximalist splash pages.
0:00 1994 Comic Hysteria & The Rise of Stephen Platt
0:34 Moon Knight #55: The Birth of "Splatt Mania"
1:06 Rob Liefeld, Image Comics, and Prophet
1:23 Wizard #35: "The Road to Insanity" Contest
1:53 The $137,000 Heritage Auction Connection
2:10 Can You Actually Count the Shell Casings?
2:38 The 2013 Cover Sale vs. Modern Market Insanity