2025: Collecting Year in Review

As I sit by the fire1 nursing a cup of coffee2 while sleet/snow falls outside3 I can’t help but reflect on a year of comic art collecting.4 Here’s an update on my collecting, with some thoughts on what I learned along the way. My hope is that this may be useful to other newer collectors finding their way in the hobby.

Three pieces added, none sold. All three additions are from the Nightwing ongoing series, which was more of a coincidence than by design. One is from 2008, the other two are from the same issue in 2000. The 2008 piece lacks lettering, while the 2000 pieces don’t. All include pencils and inks, rather than inks over printed digitally-drawn blue lines.

I’ll sprinkle this post with pictures of pieces I bid on but didn’t win. Here’s page 16 of The Brave and the Bold #5 (Barry Kitson). Maybe I should have stuck with this one. The top panel of Hal Jordan and the Flash’s faces are great, but the vertical action panels are a little to small and muddled for it to truly sing (in my view).

I didn’t set out to spend the year only buying Nightwing art; that’s certainly not the only type of art I was looking for. Over the past year I’ve thought a lot about how to focus my collecting. Seasoned collectors in the hobby frequently advise newbies to “make a list.” The list helps you stay disciplined and preserve your hobby funds for when those pieces that are particularly important to you hit the market. Sounds good, but can you build the plane while flying it? How am I supposed to build a list without knowing what’s available? Is my list supposed to reflect the realities of the market? If not, then what’s the point of a list that requires me to win the lottery to actualize it? These are all questions that I sought to think through this year. Here’s how it happened.

Pages 2-3, JLA: Our Worlds at War #1 (Ron Garney/Mark Morales). I love the depiction of the Martian Manhunter, and the inclusion of Kyle Rayner (my favorite Green Lantern) is a nice bonus. However, Rayner’s a little small, and I already have a nice Martian Manhunter character piece, so I wasn’t ready to go all the way for this one.

After I purchased my first piece in February of this year, I tried to dial back the spending. I had decided on a budget for the calendar year, I knew I’d be going to Awesome Con in April and Baltimore Comic Con in October, and I hoped to find pieces there. Instead of hunting to buy, I haunted the auction sites - Heritage, Comic Connect, Comic Link - to gather information and develop my taste, asking myself: what artists do I like? How much does their work typically sell for? Am I more interested in nostalgia, i.e. art from my halcyon days of reading comics in the early 2000s, or in the significance of an artist to the comic art medium generally? How do my interests stack up against the money I can realistically spend on the hobby? I thought of this research as developing my Spidey sense for the art market, so that when I saw a piece I really loved, I could make a reasonable estimate of a fair price. I also turned to YouTube and podcasts5 to learn about how other collectors approach the hobby.

My fear at the start of the year was that there wasn’t much to the comic art collecting hobby aside from swiping a credit card. Luckily, this year I learned that the fear was unfounded. The research I described above is a (critical, imo) part of the collecting process. I enjoy seeing what’s available, wondering at eye-bulging prices achieved by pieces I wouldn’t look at twice, and learning about the history of comics through oft-informative lot descriptions.

A few observations as I close out the year:

1. To my disappointment, there wasn’t much original art available at Awesome Con, and much of what I saw at Baltimore felt like I had seen it before on dealers’ websites. Relying on dealers at shows limits you to whatever they decided to bring to a given show; I find auctions more exciting because you never know what will pop up. That’s not a knock on dealers, just the reality when people are lugging inventory around the country.

2. After much consideration, I’ve (tentatively) decided to organize my collecting around specific characters, particularly those whom I grew up reading (hence the Nightwing acquisitions). This focus allows me to narrow the universe of possible purchases, and it’s also realistic; it means I’m not overly focused on a particular artist. Hopefully as my budget allows, I can upgrade to pieces by blue-chip artists depicting those characters, but in the near term, I can still make nice additions to my collection that fall within my price range.

3. There’s a lot of art available. As much as I’d like to, I don’t need to own all of it. As a matter of routine, on Thursday mornings I review the lots for next week’s Heritage weekly Wednesday auction, and “track” those lots I find interesting. If I’m still thinking about a lot I saw by Friday, it may be worth bidding on. If not, that’s my first signal that I shouldn’t be bidding.

4. Tying a budget to a calendar year can create a “burning a hole in the pocket” effect as the year closes. I’ve tried to discipline myself in that regard by allowing myself to roll funds over to the next year’s collecting.

5. I enjoy art much more when it’s on the wall rather than in an Itoya. I’ve been using Framebridge, and have had five pages floated on a digital white mat and framed with their black Mercer Slim frame. The uniformity of the frame sizes when displayed side-by-side suggests the uniformity you’d expect from comic pages. The black frame complements the inks but doesn’t distract from the art, while floating allows the entirety of the work to remain visible so you can still see all the marginalia unique to original art.

Unused cover prelim, Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge #1 (Scott Koblish). I love Flash’s rogues’ gallery, so having many of them present here was particularly appealing. I was hesitant to bid further because it’s unpublished, and I wanted to preserve funds for published art, but congratulations to whomever picked this up.

That’s all for my end-of-year hobby meditations. I’ll follow this up in January with my 2026 comic art resolutions. If I don’t see you until then, here’s to a very happy holiday season!