Comic Book Art

Comic book art has become a very important and worthwhile collecting hobby because of the prices that collectors pay for certain pieces of this art. Although you may laugh and enjoy the colourful pictures that you see in comics, there is a certain skill involved in creating true art forms. The art of comic books is now recognized as a legitimate art form because of the amount of detail that viewers get from looking at the pictures. The saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words' is certainly true when it comes to comics because often no words are needed to convey the message.

One of the features of comic book art is that it tells a story in sequence. You have to produce many different pictures for each segment of the story and they all have to have the same uniform qualities. The setting of the pictures has to be realistic, even if the characters are from another world. The faces of the characters have to show expression in order for the reader to be able to discern how they are feeling at each stage of the story. With the artwork in a comic, it is possible to understand the story without reading a lot of the words.

Collecting comic book art did not really start to take shape until the 1960's, about thirty years after the first comic books came on the market. In order to determine the value of the art, you have to first look at the era of the art and time frame. If the art was published in a comic book, it is obviously more valuable than any unpublished pieces. Prior to 1968, art used in comics was quite large. The larger pieces are worth more money than the smaller pieces like those we see today.

The problem is that comics were not regarded as true art or fiction when they were popular. The publisher owned the rights to the works and often destroyed the originals once the comic was published. This is why comics from the earlier periods are so valuable today.