$3.36 million is a lot of money for the work of an artist who has received little attention up until now.

Mike Zeck, born in 1949, is part of the armada of American superhero artists who found their living and wages in the 1980s when the genre flourished for the third time.

But just a decade later his career petered out due to a lack of originality.

But now a comic page designed by him has become the most expensive of all time: it was sold the day before yesterday at an auction of the auction house Heritage in Dallas, USA, for 2.8 million dollars;

with a premium, that's 3.36 million dollars (almost three million euros).

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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That's not even the highest price for a comic book original; Exactly one year ago, the gouache by the Belgian artist Hergé – in contrast to Zeck, however, a recognized grand master of the genre – achieved 3.2 million euros for a cover picture that was created in 1936 for an album of his series “Tintin” and then not had been published. The reason for this: Hergé had designed this motif in such a complex and detailed way that the printing costs would have been too high. That also explains the record price 85 years later.

Zeck's now auctioned page is completely different, namely striking: His drawings for page 25 of the eighth book of the series "Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars" from 1984 offer above all an expressive large view of Spider-Man, who is taking place here in the usual red and blue in a black spider costume. That is the reason for the high price, because there was something special about this costume: In the further course of the events, it should turn out to be a parasitic extraterrestrial life form with amazing mutating abilities, which plays badly with its host and therefore calls itself "Venom" - poison. As every superhero grows with their supervillains, Venom subsequently became a regular nemesis for Spider-Man, so popular with readers that she made it to the big screen.

Zeck's first depiction of her dark appearance thus represents something of a new beginning in the Spider-Man success story, which has been going on since 1962, and that owes it to a less qualified team of authors - "Secret Wars" wrote Jim Shooter, and who of three other collaborators Zeck's pencil drawings for the costly page 25 are no longer known today - in view of the fact that the crème of superhero authors then came up with the adaptable horror (one could think of many things . . .) busy, nothing to do with it.

The beautiful shudder of the first glimpse into an abyss of malice is paid for.

This is also a sign of our time.