Comic Heights

Artcurial, in Paris, posted a world-record price for a comic-strip illustration on March 29. The sale’s top lot, a 1932 ink and gouache design for the cover of Tintin en Amérique—the third installment of the classic French series Les aventures de Tintin, about an intrepid young reporter who travels the world with his dog, Milou—fetched €764,000 ($1.2 million), against an estimate of €280,000 ($436,000). In excellent condition, the illustration is one of five cover designs in the 23-book series, produced between 1930 and 1976, for which its late Belgian creator, Hergé, used gouache. Artcurial specialist Eric Leroy praised the work’s “modernity and hypnotic appeal.”

The previous top price for a comic-strip illustration was €176,900 ($276,000), paid in March 2007, also at Artcurial, for a 1994 acrylic from the Yugoslavian-born Enki Bilal’s love story Bleu sang. That sum was easily surpassed this time around by another of the evening’s high bids: €300,800 ($469,000), for a watercolor, gouache and black felt-pen design (est. €30,000; $47,000) that the Italian comic-book creator Hugo Pratt, who died in 1995, made for the cover of his album Ethiopiche, about an adventurer named Corto Maltese. A series of 16 plates by Bilal fetched a combined €847,200 ($1.3 million), of which €174,500 ($272,000) was contributed by a plate in pencil and acrylic from La tétralogie du monstre, his four-book series about Sarajevo orphans (est. €30,000; $47,000). In total, the sale yielded a record €3.44 million ($5.4 million), with nine of the 650 lots earning more than €50,000 ($78,000) each.

Artcurial partner François Tajan launched the comic-strip sales in 2005. He says the market is mostly French and has yet to lure collectors of contemporary art—but he predicts this will soon change.

"Comic Heights" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.