"If I may ask a question of the forum, what is it that got you into collecting original art in the first place?"

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I accidentally started collecting comic art.  I never really thought about such a thing until MidOhioCon 2004.  It was JB's final show and Jim Warden was set up there next to him selling JB's artwork.  I flipped through the pages and talked myself into getting a piece.  I thought, what the heck, it's JB's final con and I can get him to personalize a piece to me.  After that, JB's commission work really took off and I found myself drooling over pieces at my computer desk more and more frequently.  By late 2006 I was fully addicted.

I started collecting art basically because i saw Bob McLeod's website one day about 3 years and finally realized, that with the advent of the internet, contacting some of my favourite comic creators was possible ( and that they would respond to me was awesome!).  Hence, Bob did me a Spider-Man piece that was my first and i've slowly collected various things since, some of which I've since sold in hopes of getting some better pieces.  Regrettably, i've sold the only JB piece i had, but mostly as a way of saving towads a single character commission from him.

"If I may ask a question of the forum, what is it that got you into collecting original art in the first place?"

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I only own one piece so far, but if I could afford more I certainly would own more. What appeals to me is simply the idea that a piece of original art is the actual "real thing." To know that the hands, pencil, pen, and brush of Joe Kubert actually made this image makes it worth owning.

I've been a comics collector for a long time, but about ten years ago some friends of mine started up the first big Norwegian Comic-con. Part of the comic-con was an exhibit of original art, but most norwegian comic book artists didn't sell their original art.  ( I remember when a few years later the 3rd most popular comics artist in Norway came to the festival office to ask if anyone knew how much to charge for original art, since so many had asked him if they could buy. He wondered if 20 dollars was too much. His editor was there and told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to let a single page go for less than 150 dollars, because if he did someone would just buy up everything at 20 dollars and sell it again for 150 or more. He sold out every page he put up for sale at 150 dollars. Might have been a factor in him being able to quit fileting fish for a living and do comics full time. )

One of the vendors at an early con had a page of Dick Dillin artwork from an issue of Justice League. Dick Dillin is one of my favourite JLA artists, so I paid 40-50 dollars for the page. After that I started picking up small pieces at that festival and at the Bristol con.
Which is where I bought my first Stan Goldberg Archie page (strangely enough every page of his I've bought has Betty or Veronica in a bikini.  Hm.) and it's also where I first saw a page of JB's original art (more than my spending budget for the festival) and where I first saw an original Kirby page (Thor and the Wrecking Crew) courtesy of Kyle Baker who'd just traded a stack of his own original art for the page.

I only had about 10 pieces up until a few weeks ago when I finally cracked and went on an eBay spending spree.  Now there's about 20 pages working their way through the mail, most of them priced at 10 to 25 dollars. But still, to me they look like great pages.  There were some full 5-6 page Archie stories by Stan Goldberg and Dan Decarlo that were put up yesterday for 50 to 120 dollars (buy it now) so I cracked totally even though I'm saving up for the Raptus comics festival in 2 weeks.

Joe Rubinstein inks

How did Joe get to that so quickly!??!?!