Hyderabad: In any economy, but particularly in this one, it’s tempting to hand your money over to a man who confidently says: “Give me $3,000 (Rs1.29 lakh) today, and I can give you $4,000 by next month.”
It’s just as tempting, though, to snatch the money right back when Satyajit Chetri, a 28-year-old software engineer, reveals that he’ll probably invest it in a couple of scribbled-over sketches for a Punisher comic book.
One-time investment? Satyajit Chetri, a collector of original comic-book art, at his apartment in Begumpet, Hyderabad (Photo by: P Anil Kumar/Mint)
But Chetri, who claims to be India’s sole collector of original comic-book art, knows what he’s talking about. Trawling auction websites and comic-book forums for affordable art for years, he’s seen the market inflate to alarming proportions.
The boom reached its quivering peak in March, when an original Hergé sketch for the cover of Tintin in America sold for $1.22 million. A month later, one dealer said to The New York Observer: “People who bought this stuff in the 1970s got a better return than anything else on the market, with the exception of something like Microsoft.”
“Right now, I’d say this market is booming even more than the market for traditional art, relatively speaking,” Chetri says. “European collectors are buying heavily because of their favourable exchange rate with the dollar. But nobody knows whether it is a bubble or not. Either the bust will really come, or it will never come.”
A comic book’s original sketch work, after it’s been scanned for reproduction, is returned to its artist; companies such as Marvel and DC Comics only own the rights of reproduction, not the originals themselves. “So, the artists then hire representatives, who sell this art for them,” says Chetri. The comic art market is usually a cyclical one, driven furiously by the engine of nostalgia. “The pages of a comic book drawn in a particular era become valuable when its original readers grow up and start making enough money to buy them,” Chetri says.
But in recent times, that cycle has been broken. “Some modern artists, like Jim Lee, are commanding current prices that are equivalent to the prices of works like the greats Hal Foster and Jack Kirby,” says Pablo Portillo, a collector and dealer of comic-book art in Spain. “Now, we know that Kirby’s art after 30 years has risen steadily. But nobody knows if these kind of prices for modern art can be sustained 30 years down the line.”