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A curated $6 million shopping spree, part 4 – Syd Hoff

In which I continue my $6M Comics Shopping Spree

As you may recall, Action Comics #1 (DC, 1938) sold for $6M not long ago, breaking all previous records for a comic book sold at auction. The sale got me playing a fun “What if?” game in my head, like you do when you hear about big lottery winners. We all do that, right? You can grab a reasonable facsimile of Action Comics #1 to enjoy this comic at home and come along with me as I “spend” $6 million on one-of-a-kind original comic art. The kind of thing that museum curators (like myself) call you up to borrow. I’ll explain in more detail at the end of this post if you’ve started at this point for some reason.

Syd Hoff

Syd Hoff’s work is among some of the most recognizable and enduring illustrated comic work of the 20th Century. You’ve read Danny and the Dinosaur, right? What about the one where they visit a museum? His book about a circus elephant who is forced to make his own way in the big city was a bigger hit at our house, Oliver.

His remarkable collection of cartoons, The Ruling Clawss, which he did under the name A. Redfield for the “Daily Worker,” was recently reissued by the New York Review of Books for the first time in almost 100 years. It’s a hilarious collection, and though a few cartoons perhaps do not carry the bite they did when they were first published, it is still filled with cartoons that give me a knowing, grim grin. I should write a full review of this book, as I don’t think I’ve seen much on it in the year or so it’s been out.

So, now that we’ve acknowledged the Socialist communicator and said nice things, let’s take out the fantasy checkbook fat enough to please a budding oligarch and go shopping.

$159, sold December 2021

It feels completely out of reality that Syd Hoff’s original cartoons and illustrations can be had for less than $200. I have *seen* uninteresting art made by unknown people sell for far more. And not very many of Hoff’s drawings seem to have been sold. Perhaps because the price has been (too) low? I loved his illustrations when I was a kid, and my kid loves them today. Syd Hoff’s work is still widely recognized and beloved. If I saw something in real life that really clicked with me, I’d be very tempted to pay my real money for his work.

$60,  sold October 2020

$60, sold October 2020

Hoff sold hundreds of cartoons to the New Yorker and hundreds more to other prestigious magazines.

$2,250, sold October 2024

My name is Benjamin, so … yes, I need this one. But of course, it’s also the most expensive by far. Just my luck.

$350, sold December 2022

No, that price is not each, that’s total for the lot.

$600, sold December 2022

Another bargain, perhaps. There are apparently seven more drawings in this lot, but we’re only shown five. More examples of Syd Hoff’s work that was not for children. These also have some rather alarming condition issues with the water damage/ damp staining, but a top-notch paper conservator could probably get that cleaned up and looking a lot better, and better conserved for future preservation.  Again, I’m not worrying about that now.

If you’ve loved Syd Hoff’s work and want to learn more about his cartooning, grab that book at the top of this post and a few others of Hoff’s books, The Art of Cartooning, and The Young Cartoonist: the ABC’s of Cartooning can be found on Amazon and archive.org,

$4,755,800 – $3,480 = $4,752,320 remains to spend.

All that gorgeous Syd Hoff art would cost less than the buyer’s premium for some earlier entries. Just astonishing. To sum up the situation I have put myself in, here is a little recap:

Action Comics Number 1, sold for $6 million

Action Comics Number 1, sold for $6 million, image courtesy Heritage Auctions

So, let’s say we’ve hit upon a Brewster’s Millions scenario where we must spend the $6M, and it must be spent on original comic art. Not $1M in comic art and $5M on a really nice house — all $6M on comic art. I’ll throw in a Blu-Ray of the excellent Richard Prior/ John Candy movie.

I will buy art I like, not things I only see as “an investment,” and talk about my selections. Art I want to hang on my walls and live with and enjoy. After spending $6M on original art, conservation funding, gallery space, and state-of-the-art storage will be added as a reward, so I don’t have to worry about it as I’m splashing out for big-ticket items and won’t let my museum curator brain get too distracted about planning and worrying about caring for it all longterm. I’ve worked in museums for over twenty years, so I can’t help but think about these things.

The Rules:

  • The budget must be respected — I will only spend $6M and must spend all $6M.
  • In the interest of transparency, I will only shop publicly. Gotta show those receipts. No bidding up the next cool thing to $6M and be done. No deals with a wink and a nod to pay $6M for something not worth anywhere near that and split the difference on the back end. Let’s keep this as above board as high-end art buying can be. [cough] (**My citation of a sale somewhere *is not* an endorsement to shop there for real.**)
  • And let’s make the prices recent. No buying Jack Kirby art from a fanzine auction in 1972 and owning every piece by Jack Kirby to cross into private hands. So, let’s say anything purchased must be from any 2020 or more recent public sale. Also, no buying a whole comic shop for $6M.
  • Lastly, as curator of the Schulz Museum, it would be a conflict of interest for me to buy any Peanuts art, so there will be no Charles M. Schulz art on this list, though it’d be a dream come true to own anything by him. This adds more wiggle room to my budget because Schulz’s art is not cheap! 

Did I forget anything? Write me and let me know.

Did you miss the beginning of this series? Go back here for my first post and watch me spend nearly $1 million on the art of Bill Watterson! Or maybe you’d like Part 2, where I threw a pile of money at the work of Winsor McCay!  Part 3 was dedicated to the original artwork of Edward Gorey. This post contains some affiliate links.

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About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

Bernie Mireault’s The Jam: A Superhero Story Rooted in Reality

My copy of The Jam in hand. Photo by author

Comic writer and artist Bernie Mireault died this month. He was 63. I was not familiar with him or his work, but my friend and collaborator Nat Gertler,  wearing his About Comics publisher’s hat, worked with Mr. Mireault to get his much-lauded comic, The Jam, back into print.

In the remembrances that followed Mireault’s passing, his work was praised and cited as being too little known for how well-regarded it is. He was described as a cartoonist’s cartoonist. About Comics made their reprint available at cost for about a week, so I grabbed a copy to see for myself what everyone was talking about.

The story opens with our would-be hero, a mere mortal, getting the upper hand in a mugging about to go very wrong. That’s something I really loved here — The Jam is about a superhero who is not superhuman. He’s a guy who wants to see some good in the world and has realized he can be part of that good. But, darker forces are gathering. Disillusioned young men are being drawn to a leader with a plan, and soon enough, the Jam has pissed off the Devil himself. So, if you read The Tick and thought, I wish this had a dash of Sandman, well, you’re in the right longbox.

Mireault’s The Jam is great! The writing and art are a lot of fun and very well done. It’s a grownup comic, but not quite what modern marketing people would call “gritty.” There was also something charming about the art that reminded me of, well, The Tick or old concert posters of the era. That late-1980s indie comic feel, from the black-and-white explosion. But the story also felt rooted in a very real vision of an actual city. There’s also a ton of technical know-how and thought going into each panel, each word balloon. I realized I was analyzing the lettering at various points and thinking about how crazy it is, but it was still really well done and fun. Reading The Jam made me think, “Yeah, comics are good.”

If you like the sound of that, The Jam is available in print through About Comics.

But, I should note that comics are rarely kind, or just. If you are having thoughts of suicide, you can reach out for support by texting or calling 988. The helpline is available 24/7 across the US and all of its territories.

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Inside pages of The Jam comic book, featuring black and white comic art with action throughout several panels.
Sample pages courtesy AboutComics.com

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

A curated $6 million Comics Shopping Spree, part 1 – Bill Watterson

Action Comics Number 1, sold for $6 million

In which I go on a $6M Comics Shopping Spree

Action Comics #1 (DC, 1938) sold recently for $6M, breaking all previous records for a comic book sold at auction.

Action Comics Number 1, sold for $6 million
Action Comics Number 1, sold for $6 million, image courtesy Heritage Auctions

$6M for one comic book? That’s *a lot* of money for a comic book. It is nearly double the previous record set only a few years ago in 2021, which I think has since been regarded as funded through someone moving crypto around.

Granted, this most recent purchase is perhaps *the* comic book. If there is one comic book to own, one of these copies would be it.  I’m not begrudging the auction result. $6M is a small number in the world of fine art auctions. Even for rare books, $6M wouldn’t crack the top 10 of record auction results. But for comics, it’s enormous.

But, for $6M, you could buy something absolutely unique—not just one of a handful. Totally. Unique. And if you want to stay with comics, you can buy *a lot* of original comic art for $6M. Not just a piece or two, but an incredible collection. Original comic art is still among the best art bargains in the world, and perhaps if we play a game, I can show what I mean. 

Let’s say we’ve hit some kind of Brewster’s Millions scenario1 where we must spend $6M, and must be spent on original comic art. And not $1M in comic art and $5M on a really nice house and estate for it all. All $6M of it on comic art. I will buy stuff I like, not things as “an investment,” and talk about my selections. Art I want to hang on my walls and live with and enjoy. After spending $6M on original art, conservation funding, gallery space, and state-of-the-art storage will be added as a reward, so I don’t have to worry about it as I’m splashing out for big-ticket items and don’t let my museum curator brain get too distracted about planning and worrying about caring for it all longterm. I’ve worked in museums for over twenty years now, so I can’t help but think about these things.

Some parameters:
The budget must be respected — I will only spend $6M and get as close as possible to spending all $6M.

In the interest of transparency, I will only shop publicly. Gotta show those receipts. No bidding up the next cool thing to $6M and be done. No deals with a wink and a nod to pay $6M for something not worth anywhere near that and split the difference on the back end. Let’s keep this as above board as high-end art buying can be. [cough]

And let’s make the prices recent. No buying Jack Kirby art from a fanzine auction in 1972 and owning every piece by Jack Kirby to cross into private hands. So, let’s say anything purchased must be from any 2020 or more recent public sale. Also, no buying a whole comic shop for $6M.

And lastly, as curator of the Schulz Museum, it’d be a conflict of interest for me to buy any Peanuts art, so there will be no Charles M. Schulz art on this list, though it’d be a dream come true to own anything by him.

Did I forget anything? Write me and let me. Ok, let’s go!

FIRST UP!

Bill Watterson

$480,000, sold Nov. 2022

This particular Calvin & Hobbes Sunday has so much going for it. We get the stars of the strip doing the classic “ride downhill in a wagon” theme having a fun conversation.

I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, so Watterson hooked me early on and was the “cannot miss” comic strip each day. Calvin & Hobbes was the strip we talked about on the playground of Ruth Hill Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska. I begged for the reprint paperback book collections when they came out, added them to Christmas wishlists, and celebrated the arrival of each one like a long-lost treasure. I wish I would have clipped them out of our newspaper (the Lincoln Journal-Star)! The strip is still hilarious today, even though my perspective has shifted from that of the adventurous, yearning kid to that of the beleaguered and baffled Dad. My 9-year-old has discovered Calvin & Hobbes, too, and I’ve had to do *a lot* of explaining. But it’s been a lot of fun. Still, repeat after me: Calvin sometimes makes *really* bad decisions.

Bill Watterson’s originals are incredibly rare in private hands. He kept most of his originals and has since donated the collection to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University. So, the above strip is the only Calvin & Hobbes original Sunday sold since 2020. After working with Charles Schulz’s original artwork for Peanuts for a few years, I finally got to see some of Watterson’s originals for Calvin & Hobbes, and I was shocked to see they were so small! He packed a lot of fine work into that small space. His art is even more impressive now than when I first saw it growing up, though even then, I knew it was something special.

$216,000, sold Sept. 2022

Yes, I’ll have this one, too. Watterson’s dinosaurs and monsters have always been so much fun, but after I saw somewhere that Schulz admired how Watterson drew furniture, I look at that too, and admire it.

$156,000, sold June 2023

This daily, originally published on 12/30/1987, was sold at Heritage Auctions, and even in the photos they posted, the condition looks a little concerning. It’s heavily toned, and I have seen them sweeten the photos before, so I don’t quite trust it 100%, which gives me pause. However, with the promise of conservation funding at the end, I feel good diving in.

$6M – $852,000 = $5,148,000 remains to spend.

Did you miss the beginning of this series? Go back here for my first post and watch me spend nearly $1 million on the art of Bill Watterson! Or maybe you’d like Part 2, where I threw a pile of money at the work of Winsor McCay!  Part 3 was dedicated to the original artwork of Edward Gorey. In Part 4, I buy up everything drawn by Syd Hoff. This post contains some affiliate links.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

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  1. Which has a comics connection, by the way. ↩︎

Maud the Mirthful Mule – F. Opper

Maud the Mirthful Mule by F. Opper spins in reaction to being pinched by crabs and lobsters.

I made a free mini-zine for the Santa Rosa Zine Fest this past weekend at the Northwest branch in Santa Rosa, California. This post basically includes all the contents of the zine for you. I gave them away when anyone asked about swaps, or if we just visited, or I bought a zine from them. The selection of comic panels are what I used for interior pages, and if you unfolded the whole thing, you’d see the full-color Sunday strip, like a mini poster. I had a blast seeing everyone, enjoying a little sunshine, and swapping with everyone, too.

A few favorite panels from F. Opper’s Maud the Mirthful Mule, from 1907. Frederick Burr Opper created an entire Opper-verse on newspaper comics pages in the early 20th Century. Different strips with characters as popular then as any pop culture favorite today, like Happy Hooligan, Alphonse and Gaston, Maud, and more. The dynamic drawing found in his comic strips inspires artists today.

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See below for the full strip for this panel.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

RIP Trina Robbins

Trina Robbins speaking at the 2023 WonderCon in Anaheim, California. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia

I did not know Trina Robbins very well, but she has impacted my thinking and my work. She was the kind of person that, after hearing her stories and reading her work, I have a deep appreciation for what she accomplished, and I wish I could have gotten to know her more and talked with her about something we share — a passion for the work of comics history.

I had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times in the past few years. The first time I met Trina was when I joined her on a panel at FanExpo in San Francisco in November 2022. I remember it as the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and our panel topic was the centennial of the birth of Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Cartoonist and maze master Joe Wos, who organized the panel, invited Lex Fajardo, the editorial director for Schulz Creative Associates, and me (as curator of the Schulz Museum) to join him and Trina in a wide-ranging discussion of Schulz and his impact on cartooning. Trina was the only one of us to have really known Charles Schulz, bringing not only her stories of meeting Sparky (as he was known to those who knew him) but also her perspective as a Bay Area cartoonist and younger contemporary to him. It was fascinating and, of course, a lot of fun. Few people can tell the story about getting Charles Schulz to contribute a piece to a collection of cartoonists’ nude portraits.

Trina was in high demand that weekend, rushing from panel to table, signings, and other events that day. She joined us a few minutes late and had to leave the panel early for her next commitment, so I didn’t really get a chance to visit with her in that first meeting, though I got to basically sit next to her and hear her tell stories for an hour or so.

I’m so glad I remembered to bring my tape recorder with me, so I at least got audio of the panel—most of it, at least. The brand-new batteries I installed died, and I had to switch to my phone, but something went wrong—don’t try to talk on a panel and record yourself simultaneously if you can help it. At least I got a good chunk of our talk, which is now in the Schulz Museum’s archives.

The next time I saw her was at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2023, when we both had books nominated for an Eisner Award in the same category: Best Comics-Related Book. Attending the Eisner Awards is another story, but there’s a little time as people arrive and get settled in to say a few hellos. I saw her and said hello, and wished her good luck. I’m not confident she remembered me or even knew I was one of the other authors in her category, but she was very gracious. I was so overwhelmed just being in the room, so I don’t remember any other details, especially after Nat Gertler and I were announced as winning the category.

Though she was not awarded an Eisner that night (I thought she would win), her book about Gladys Parker is fabulous. Just as all of her historical work is not only well done but groundbreaking and essential reading. Comics is a rich field for study and enjoyment, enriching our lives as readers, thinkers, artists, and whole people. Trina brought that home, especially preserving, sharing, valuing, promoting, and shouting about women in comics from the rooftops.

After meeting Trina, hearing about her work, and finding her books, I looked at my own writing, my own thinking, and my own historical work and asked myself, “Where are the women?” In one project in particular that I’ve been slowly working on for a couple of years, a collection of short historical essays about the working methods of cartoonists, there were very few women initially. Now, it’s better, but there’s always room to improve. Thank you, Trina, for your work, for being wholly you.

UPDATE:

Andrew Farago compiled a wonderful collection of remembrances of Trina Robbins for The Comics Journal if you’ve not seen it yet.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

Eisner Award Nomination

Silver circle foil seal for a Will Eisner Nominee book. Features the comic signature of comic artist Will Eisner, a large letter E as the central figure, and the word Nominee at the bottom. In very small print at the outer edge of the circle seal, it reads Comic Con International Comic Industry Awards

The book I wrote with Peanuts fan extraordinaire Nat Gertler has been nominated for a Will Eisner Award by the people who bring you Comic-Con International in San Diego each year! Voting has closed for the comics publishing industry award, but it’s been a thrill just to be nominated. I’ve never won an award and tended to roll my eyes at the idea of being grateful for a nomination, but I get it now. This is a recognition of the hard work of *so many* people. I’m so proud and grateful to my team at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, our publishers Weldon-Owen, and all the fans of Charles M. Schulz, who have supported the museum and all do a part in preserving and sharing the legacy of Charles Schulz and Peanuts.

Of course, the book is still available everywhere that good books are sold, and proceeds support the Schulz Museum. You can also buy the book directly from the Schulz Museum, which is a way to support the museum doubly. You can even leave a note when you purchase to request that I sign it, and I’m happy to do that.

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.