DALLAS, TX.- Just two months after setting the record for the most valuable Spider-Man cover ever sold at auction, Heritage returns with aComics & Comic Art event stuffed full of ttreasures spanning the medium’s history — including another historic “Spider-Man” cover that’s a galaxy removed from the Marvel Universe.
Executive Vice President Todd Hignite, who’s not prone to hyperbole, says of the April 3-6 Comics & Comic Art Signature® Auction, “None of us can remember an auction that was so deep with stellar examples spanning all time periods and collecting interests. The entire world of comic art is well represented, from rare early art and first appearances to the best in newer works by all the greatest artists.”
Include, too, the remarkable comic books available — some of the world’s finest copies of one of the world’s most important and hardest-to-find titles, among them a spectacular debut (Detective Comics No. 1) and stunning farewell (the last issue of All Winners Comics) — and the eye wanders while the mind reels. Where even to begin?
Perhaps there’s no better place to start than with the man who stands atop Heritage’s Hall of Fame for the most valuable artwork sold regardless of category: Frank Frazetta, the Norman Rockwell of the swords-and-sorcery set and a man who could make the brutal look sexy and the sexy look dangerous. This event contains a coveted work from Frazetta’s prime: his original painting for the cover of the 1967 Banner Press paperback Night Walk, author Bob Shaw’s debut novel about a man blinded and imprisoned on a theocratic planet.
The work is famously called Spider-Man for obvious reasons, as a lithe, muscular man — barely dressed, if at all — tussles with a giant arachnid, whose red and green insides roil to the watery surface as the sky seemingly glows with an apocalyptic sunset. The spider’s giant legs, resembling hairy spikes, are no match for the man’s single spear. Frazetta paints the battle’s end like an observer sitting on the lake’s shore, capturing every vein, seta, burble and last gasp. This is Frazetta’s calling card — a vision of the heroic embrace of death, an ode to the warriors of forgotten and foreign realms, painted with the artist’s familiar fervor.
Spider-Man, still offered in prints that sell for small fortunes, hails from Frazetta’s most fertile period — the years between his watercolor Tarzanand John Carter paperback covers for Ace and the painted Conan covers for Lancer, that period during which his works got Creepy and Eerie for Warren Publishing, that moment when the movie studios hired him to paint their posters. Frazetta used to say that the moment he started getting paid — and getting to keep his original artwork — he began turning out his self-proclaimed “masterpieces,” because they were as much for him as for the publisher or the reader. Spider-Man climbs high on that list of masterpieces.
And where there’s an iconic Spider-Man, an equally famous Spider-Woman follows — specifically, Gil Kane’s original artwork for the cover of Marvel Spotlight No. 32, which introduced “Mighty Marvel’s Newest Sensation” then known as The Spider-Woman.
The character was created initially to protect Marvel’s copyright, as Stan Lee feared DC might put its spin on one of his most famous characters. But Spider-Woman had revered parents: She was created by Archie Goodwin and Marie Severin (who designed her costume), with Kane — perhaps best known for having designed the Silver Age Green Lantern’s costume during his acclaimed tenure at DC Comics — completing the holy trinity as he contributed a cover heralding the “mind-numbing origin” of a character brainwashed by HYDRA to kill Nick Fury.
Years later, Kane’s introduction of The Spider-Woman was among the 41-cent stamps issued in 2007 by the United States Postal Service to celebrate Marvel Comics, alongside covers from the first issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, The X-Men, The Invincible Iron Man and Sub-Mariner – easily identifiable icons all. It took just three decades for the character to leap from the drawing table and the spinner rack to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum — and now, finally, to auction as one of the centerpiece offerings in this historic event.
There is no shortage of significant and marvelous Marvels, chief among them Page 7 from Tales of Suspense No. 39 — the story page that introduced Iron Man.
Heritage has offered several Don Heck originals from the issue that would eventually turn Marvel Comics into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with two realizing more than $500,000 just last year. In fact, Page 9 from that historic book — in which Iron Man fills all eight panels — realized $552,000 last April, setting one Heck of a record for the artist.
Heck was a comics veteran by the time he teamed up with Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby to introduce Iron Man: He began working for Harvey Comics in 1949, and was hired by Lee five years later to work for the in-decline Atlas Comics, where he was “soon enhancing war books with his vigorous work on characters like ‘Torpedo’ Taylor,” Les Daniels wrote in the Marvel Comics history Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics. According to company lore, Lee and Heck basically created the character, though Kirby designed the armor since the cover was done before the story inside. Heck would later say he knew what Iron Man looked like because he’d received Kirby’s cover in the mail.
But as Heck later told Will Murray during an interview published in John Coates’ 2014 book Don Heck: A Work of Art, Lee called the artist one day and told him Tony Stark’s backstory and how he would become Iron Man. “We didn’t actually sit down and work out the characters,” Heck recalled. In fact, in a 2013 interview, Lee said he intended Stark to be unlikeable at first — a wealthy “weapons manufacturer … an industrialist” — who became a hero only after the fact. “I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him,” Lee said.
Lee might have made the man, Kirby may have created the shell, but Heck gave Tony Stark his face (“an Errol Flynn type”) and his humanity. As a result, Coates wrote, “Don became an integral part of the birth of what is known as The Marvel Age,” having worked on both Ant-Man and Iron Man before taking the reins on The Avengers, The X-Men, Daredevil and almost every other title of note during the 1960s and ’70s. It’s also worth noting that when he jumped to DC Comics in the 1970s, Heck co-created Steel with Gerry Conway. The man had a way with metals, with Iron Man the heaviest among them.
The page offered in this auction is the first in-story appearance of Iron Man. The Armored Avenger appears on the cover and the splash page, but this is the page where the imprisoned Professor Yinsen buys a few moments to allow that “mighty electronic body” to “power the heart of Tony Stark,” which was pierced by shrapnel from a landmine. Seldom do such landmark pages appear at auction. And one could easily make the case this ranks among the most significant Marvels ever offered, as this is the foundation upon which the Marvel Cinematic Universe was built. Not only did people like Tony Stark, they fell in love with him.
It’s joined in this event by something of a bookend: Kirby and Bill Everett’s original artwork for 1969’s Thor No. 171, which finds the God of Thunder tussling with Wrecker over the Manhattan skyline. Kirby was among Thor’s creators, alongside Lee and Larry Lieber, and introduced him in Journey into Mystery No. 83. The cover in this auction hails from King Kirby’s final days on the title, as he’d leave just eight issues later.
There are some monster covers in this event — literally, figuratively, both — among them Tom Yeates’ original artwork that appeared on the front of 1984’s Saga of the Swamp Thing No. 21. The book contained newcomer Alan Moore’s full-blown retcon of the character created in 1971 by writer Len Wein (who brought in the British writer) and artist Bernie Wrightson. Moore, who would soon rewrite the superhero narrative with Watchmen, stripped away all the baggage and backstory that had come before and revealed Swamp Thing not as a man who’d become a monster but as “a vegetable crawling with insects … a massive, sodden plant” who thought he was a man. Moore reinvented the character and the horror comic itself, insisting in a DC Comics promotional video that he would use the book to “focus on the reality of American horror,” whether that meant giant bugs, disease or nuclear war.
The Saga of the Swamp Thing No. 21 wasn’t merely one of the most successful comic books of the 1980s. This issue became among DC’s most reprinted books under numerous banners, including 1985’s The Best of DC No. 61 and Essential Vertigo: Swamp Thing No. 1. This cover, long hidden in a collection, has never been to auction. (Speaking of Watchmen, as comics readers often do, this event features a handful of Dave Gibbons’ pages from Book Three featuring Nite Owl, Silk Spectre and Dr. Manhattan.)
There’s another unjolly green giant here: From 1971 hails one heck of a Hulk cover by Herb Trimpe, then halfway into his storied run on the Green Goliath when he provided the cover for The Incredible Hulk No. 144. Here, True Believer, Hulk squares off against Dr. Doom — “The Monster and the Madman!” just as the story promises. Years later, this cover made its way into Upper Deck’s 2003 run of Hulk trading cards released in conjunction with Eric Bana’s first and final big-screen turn as the rampaging hero. The collection featured 45 “Famous Hulk Covers,” this one alongside issues No. 1 and No. 181, the latter of which is another Trimpe triumph marking the first full appearance of The Wolverine.
Both of those comic books are among the historic issues available in this auction: The first issue of The Incredible Hulk is one of only 14 issues graded Very Fine-Near Mint 9.0 by CGC. And The Incredible Hulk No. 181 is a Bronze Age book worth its weight in gold; there’s just one example graded higher than the CGC Near Mint/Mint 9.8 offered here.
Speaking of marvelous Marvels that look fresh off the newsstand, this auction features one of the two highest-graded copies of 1947’s All Winners Comics No. 21, considered among the hardest-to-find books in any grade much less in a CGC Near Mint/Mint 9.8. The All-Winner Squad was Timely Comics’ first team, counting Captain America and Bucky, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner among its star-spangled ranks. Issue No. 21 was their final appearance under the Timely banner; years later the story was reprinted in issues of Marvel Super-Heroes.
No less hard to find is Detective Comics No. 1, which hit newsstands in March 1937 credited to Detective Comics, Inc. — the successor to National Allied Publications and a predecessor to DC Comics. Heritage has offered very few copies of the first issue from what would become the longest-running comic in the industry. Just two years ago, when offering a CGC Very Good/Fine 5.0 copy, catalogers noted that it had been more than 11 years since Heritage had even seen an unrestored, complete copy of this coveted scarcity. The catalog then noted that “you’re not likely to find a nicer copy of this historic issue.”
