Our beneficent comic dealers...

[Dan Shane]

HorizonHSE WROTE:

> "Kindly remember that without dealers and a secondary market, not
> only would
> the artwork have little or no value -- we all know what happened
> to original
> pages when publishers thought they were worthless after the comic
> was issued
> -- but more important, older material would be difficult if not impossible
> to find."

AND I RESPOND:

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you suggesting that it was
the DEALERS that made old comics and original comic art valuable, rather
than the buyers and collectors who wanted to obtain the items for their
private use? Or that the art itself, no matter who its creator happens to
be, has no value unless some dealer somewhere decides that it does (and how
much it is worth)?

Your comment also suggests that it was impossible for collectors to find
each other or whoever possessed a sought-after item to obtain the product
they sought before dealers came along?  (Oh, I forgot, we didn't want the
stuff until the dealers told us we did.)

In my personal experience as a collector of comics, art, View-Masters,
soundtrack LPs, or old toys, dealers sometimes proved useful.  But usually
they were an impediment to getting what I wanted for the price I wished to
pay.  It was the dealers who began grabbing up everything they could get
their hands on so they could make a profit before true fans had a chance to
add to their collections for aesthetic or altruistic purposes.

Barks may not have minded dealers selling the art he produced for Western
Publishing (which never belonged to him once he turned it over to the
editors), but I don't think anyone would want to have risked asking him how
well he enjoyed being exploited in his later years.

The dealers certainly played a part in feeding my collecting gene, but if I
could ever work around them I always tried to do that.  Today that has
become so easy to do (thanks to eBay) that dealers are looking like they may
either become a thing of the past or will just join the ranks of everyone
else who has something to sell without needing a license to do so.