The highest price ever achieved for a comic original is $5.4 million, paid in Dallas at a Heritage auction in May 2019 for a cover picture by American artist Frank Frazetta for a horror comic book from 1969. Now the same thing is happening Auction House aims to beat that record and the signs are good.
Because as popular as Frazetta is with his painted erotic fantasies, another cover picture that will go under the hammer on June 23rd is legendary: that of the first booklet of the mini-series “The Dark Knight Returns” from 1986, drawn by Frank Miller. colored by Lynn Varley.
Andrew Plathaus
Responsible editor for literature and literary life.
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In order to appreciate the importance of the sheet, which measures just 45 by 30 centimeters, you have to know how the American superhero Batman was doing in the mid-eighties: bad.
The hit TV series of the 1960s had turned the formerly fierce avenger into a joke, and the competition from Marvel had outstripped him in terms of buyers' favour.
Then the publisher DC hired a young artist, the twenty-nine-year-old Frank Miller, who had just caught on with American audiences, and gave him carte blanche for a lavishly printed four-part mini-series that was intended to establish a narratively and graphically sophisticated segment in the banal hero genre .
Miller's desired character for this was Batman, and what he did with the 1939 invented bat man,
hadn't seen the world yet.
He portrayed Batman as a bitter old man, cast his teenage helper Robin as a girl, and set the whole thing in reactionary America as a reflection of Reaganomics.
The story was a smash hit, and three years later, Tim Burton's Batman, which owes everything to Miller's aesthetic, was released as the feature film that began the never-ending journey of superhero blockbusters ever since.
The cover photo of the first issue of the series is iconic and the estimate of more than two million dollars is very conservative.
Everyone knows that the new record is being sought here.