Once in a lifetime moments everyday... All part of the job at Heritage

Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Posted by Noah

As you can see by the pictures in this post, and by comments I have made in previous entries, Heritage is an amazing place to work if you have any sense of Pop Culture and/or history. Just look at the picture next to this graph.

That's one of our top comics experts, Greg Holman, holding not one, but two copies of Superman #1. That's about $100,000 worth of comic books. I'm willing to bet that most collectors will never even see a Superman #1, let alone hold one, let alone pose with two... And I would be remiss if I told you that I didn't pick them up, among others, myself.

Right before I snapped this quick pick of Greg he actually said just what I wrote. He grabbed them, looking down at them with admiration...

"Stay right there," I said. "Hold up those books."

Click.

One of the beauties of running PR here at Heritage is that I do indeed get to get close up and personal with any number of amazing pieces, Be they coins, currency, posters, comics, natural history, Space Exploration, instruments, Americana... You name it, and it's likely that I've been lucky enough to come in close contact with it, and have shortened those degrees of separation between myself and major figures in history and/or Pop Culture... Yep, that's right... Ol' George Washington and I - I like to call him GW for short - we're like this...

I hope that I never ever get jaded - so far so good - because it would be a crying shame given the amazing amount of great stuff in this building... I am indeed a lucky man...

The other picture you see here is the main group of value from last week's comics auction, all told at least $250,000. Again, for so many it would be a dream to simply be in the presence of one of them, forget being able to set them up and group them together for a photo while a local TV crew shot footage for the six o'clock news. Alas, I do not get to take them home, but I do still get to bask in their glory, and - on this day, at this time of life - that's more than enough.

As Bizarro Superman might say: Life am good.

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-Noah Fleisher

Bernie Wrightson totally creeps me out, and I mean that in the best way possible…

July 23, 2009
Posted by Noah

If you sense a slight lag in my sentences today it’s because I am having trouble typing through the savage grief in my bones and the stinging tears in my eyes…

If you haven’t heard the news then I advise you to sit down for this, because it’s going to hurt: Gidget the Chihuahua, who was famous for having the words, “Yo quiero Taco Bell” CGI-ed onto her grizzled muzzle, as well as for having spent the better part of a forgettable Hollywood movie riding around in Reese Witherspoon’s purse (nice work, if you can get it) has died at the age of 15… That, though, isn’t what has me so bitter I could chew tinfoil. No… It’s the fact that this dog’s death is national news and the fact that more people can utter the tagline to that inane fast food commercial than can recite the preamble to the Constitution… Which category do you fall in?

No, what I am morning is the very death of good taste and erudition in America… The obit linked to above actually quotes the owner as saying that Gidget was “happy right up to the end.” Um… Okay… She was a dog… A dog with a brain the size of a pecan… It’s not like she had a lot of room to contemplate the deeper truths of the universe.

My bile raised, I wanted something to calm me down. I gravitated to the upcoming comics auction here at Heritage and it wasn’t more than a minute before I started paging through the Bernie Wrightson original artwork grouping in the sale. Granted, it’s not the most cheerful stuff, but Wrightson is an unqualified master of horror comics – his imagery is familiar to almost every pop culture fan in the nation, in some form or another – and the very thought of his original Swamp Thing #8 artwork was enough to make me swoon. I spent many an hour with Swamp Thing as a kid, most of them hiding in the back a huge bush in our backyard, with frequent visits by one of our many dogs, where I read those things over and over and over until they literally crumbled in my hands.

Wrightson is a legendary modern comics figure, and, as I’ve learned from a couple of our comic guys here, this trove of his work is as good a grouping as a Heritage auction has ever had. The Uncle Creepy splash page and the cover to the Bernie Wrightson 1977 NYCA Gallery Catalog is among the most brilliant work this great artist has ever done. It’ll rightly bring a pretty penny.

If you don’t know Wrightson’s name, a quick glance at some of his work will quickly familiarize you with him. The bulging eyes, wild hair and oily, creeping colors have a subtlety that is all its own. The work is equally compelling and repelling, which is what I reckon makes it so much fun… I suppose some might say the same about that dog and its strange fame. I wouldn’t disagree, necessarily, I would just make the case that one adds infinitely to the national pop culture archive, making as collectively smarter in the end, while the other does just the opposite… In fact, I can feel IQ points draining as I think about it. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

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-Noah Fleisher