The eyes of the art world may have been on Christie's auction house in New York City this week where a portrait by Pablo Picasso sold for $48.4 million. But for comic book collectors, a nondescript suite in an Irvine business park is where the action is.
There, the same people who sold Bob Dylan's first guitar for $75,000 and a black and gold bustier worn by Madonna for $4,000 are conducting what is billed as an unprecedented auction of nearly $1.5 million worth of comics. That includes several rare items, the comic book equivalents of the high-priced Picasso.
The bidding--by telephone, fax, mail and Internet--began at Executive Collectibles Gallery on Nov. 3 and continues until Saturday at 6 p.m. Or, as gallery owner Bill Hughes says, "until the phones stop ringing for 15 minutes. It usually ends up at midnight."
As of Wednesday, the gallery already had received top bids totaling $700,000, including a $50,000 offer for the auction's most coveted item: a copy of Action Comics No. 1, the June 1938 comic book that introduced Superman and ushered in what is considered the Golden Age of comic books.
The comic book, which originally sold for a dime, is a "very fine" grade copy valued at $70,000 to $80,000.
"That particular book is considered to be the Holy Grail of comic book collecting," said Hughes, who began amassing auction items from collectors six months ago.
A dozen complete comic book collections are among the 900 lots on the block, including those featuring Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and Archie.
"Those are the biggies," Hughes said. "Complete collections of these have never been offered before at public auction. It's very difficult to put these collections together."
In addition to about 20,000 comic books, the gallery is auctioning animation cels and science fiction/fantasy and animation movie posters.
Hughes said bids have been coming in from as far as Germany, Japan and New Zealand.
The gallery has 12 phone lines, and on Monday, its busiest day so far, it was receiving two or three calls a minute, Hughes said.
Unlike a one-day auction where bidders must make a "spontaneous decision" on an item, Hughes said, bidding by phone or Internet "gives the bidders an opportunity to bid simultaneously on any of the lots.
"If a particular lot gets out of their range they can change speed and get on something else. You don't have that option during a live auction."
