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Hi there. Over on Art Info there’s a report on the Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair, which included a few comic art dealers who commanded some very high prices for original work by Moebius and Milton Caniff. It does seem like prices run higher in Europe overall, and based purely on my conversations with various U.S. galleries and dealers, a tremendous amount of non-hero based comic art (i.e. underground old and new) is sold to European collectors. 180K may seem like a lot in the comics racket, but it’s cheap compared to a masterpiece by a comparable contemporary artist (let’s say, for the sake of argument, Ed Ruscha. Ignore dopey headline.

Speaking of dopey: Dear Chris Arrant at Robot 6: It’s not nice to quote from my article without attribution (that is, directly swiping from an interview I did). Here’s the piece I wrote (with its own dopey headline) about one aspect of Mike Kelley’s current show at Gagosian L.A. Mike’s work couldn’t have less to do with Lichtenstein, but such is life in the dopey-verse.

UPDATE: Robot 6 updated the post appropriately.

Oh yeah, and Frank would like to point out that Dave Sim responded to Jog at length in the comments section yesterday. Check it out.

Happy Friday.

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All of this recent talk makes me wonder if it might be fun to discuss a serialized comic book as it is published, issue by issue. Sort of a Comics Comics Comic-Book Book Club (I’ll think of a better name) or something. Unfortunately, here in the universally proclaimed “New Golden Age” of comic books, the pickings are surprisingly slim—most of the books Frank mentioned here are well underway by this point (or in the case of Bulletproof Coffin, has already been covered). So the best book for our purposes is unclear.

Initially, I thought Alan Moore’s new four-issue series, Neonomicon, might be a good fit, both because it just began and because it will be short. (Also, apparently, it is his LAST COMIC EVER, but somehow I feel like I’ve heard that song before.) But maybe Moore is too much old news. Do any of you have any suggestions? Ideally, an anthology title such as Weirdo or Eightball, in which the contents changed dramatically from issue to issue, would be best, but I’m not aware of anything like that existing today. If Kramers Ergot was coming out on a regular basis, it would be perfect, but it’s not. I guess we could cover MOME, starting with the current issue (which is kind of crazy actually), or even backtracking to discuss the issues of it from the beginning. Or heck, I haven’t read Heavy Metal in a thousand years, but Joe keeps plugging it, so there must be something there. Any readily available series would work, probably, though I think something contemporary and/or ongoing would be the most fun.

Anyway, the hive mind probably has many good ideas that I haven’t even considered, and nominations are welcome. Either way, a chosen title will be announced within the week. The resulting series might not make it past a single entry or may become a thousand-post epic. At one post a month that would mean the club would run until 2093–by then comic books (and Comics Comics itself) will be downloaded directly into our brains. An uplifting thought, for sure.