A couple of months ago I got a text from an old friend of mine. He, like me, is an artist, so he's got piles of drawings and envelopes and whatever sitting around his studio. One of those envelopes, it turns out, didn't have any of his art in it (or the art of any of his friends.) It contained a small collection of original art that I had back in the early 1990s. You can see a group shot above.
This was amazing on two levels. First off, I clearly remembered the Colan Daredevil page and often wondered what had happened it it. A Colan Daredevil page has long been on my art want list and I hated the fact that I once had a sweet one and just didn't know where it was. Now I do. I'm so happy. It's a great 1970s page.
Secondly, I literally forgot that I owned the other pages. The Mazzucchelli Death and the Paul Smith Wolverine I remembered owning once I saw them, but the other two pieces, the Mazzucchelli Daredevil and the Mignola Rocket Raccoon sketch still don't ring a bell.
A Mazzucchelli Daredevil is another item on my want list and I think this is a great panel page- the images of Daredevil are phenomenal.
I know what you're thinking- how did you just lose this stuff. Nowadays this small collection is like… the down-payment on a Subaru or something. At the time they might have earned you a used bicycle.
In the early 1990s, original art was nothing like it is now. There were a few people who specialized in it and it was well-represented in the early auctions which were kicking off at the time; but it wasn't as big a proportion of the hobby as it is now and individual pieces definitely didn't sell for the same relative amount as they do now when compared to the comics themselves.
For one example, I got the Colan Daredevil page for free from the shop I worked in at the time. My manager just gave it to me. He had no interest in selling it and he knew I liked Daredevil. The other pieces I'm pretty sure I bought from Bechara Maalouf and I can't imagine I spent more than a couple hundred bucks in total. Sadly, they're not priced. So, yeah, I put them in a cardboard envelope and ended up leaving them at my friends house.
Check out the pieces below. I'm tempted to sell the Death and the Wolverine since they're not really of interest to me the way they were when I bought them. The rest are getting slotted into prime spots in my collection.
