I don't have my first page anymore, but here it is. I bought it for the princely sum of $35 back in the late 80s:

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Pity to have had to let go of it. Nice page!!!

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It will doubtless please you to know, then, that I still occasionally use that piece as "reference" when I am drawing the FF or Superman.

This is the first one - I had always kind of wanted to get a piece of JB art, but it was either out of my price range, or I didn't know where to start. A friend of mine had a piece of Man of Steel that had cool doodles on the back, which I spent what seemed like hours gazing at.

Anyway - when this issue of Wonder Woman came out - remember the time - this was just after the initial JBNM run, and WW, like JBNM before it was brilliantly on fire - just great great comic work, and I was really digging the series. At the time of this particular issue, I had just had one of many bizarre relationship mis-haps that seemed to be the norm in my 20 (ah, so many years ago...) and so to see this particular page, it hit where it was supposed to.

Anyway - it stuck with me. A decade goes by, and I'm at MOC 2004, looking through the art, thinking of buying something, and there's the page. Not just is it there, but really affordable, too!

To clarify, it's not the first piece I OWNED - I have a lot of friends who work in comics professionally, and they used to give me pages all the time - which, in retrospect, considering the value of the pages, was REALLY generous gestures.

An early example of those pages I was given that stands out was this one - I have both the copy of the pencils AND the finished inked page.

As people have mentioned conventions is a great place to find oa either from
artists or oa dealers. There are also a few good websites:

Comicart-l is a yahoo group of over 2,000 members including artists,
collectors, dealers and art reps.
Comicart-l

Comicartfans is a place where collectors and artists showcase their art. It also
has links to oa dealers, many dealers are searchable directly on Comicartfans
Comicartfans

Dragon berry is a Directory of links for websites for artists, collector's
galleries, dealers, art reps. Many are smaller less well known sites which don't
show on Comicartfans.
Dragonberry

Edited by Brian Peck on 15 January 2011 at 8:55pm

Its page 8 of issue of the Hercules Heart of Chaos mini-series, by Ron Frenz and Pat Oliffe. All the other artwork I own was done at cons, aside from a Wonder Woman piece from a Brazilian artist I bought off eBay and Chris Giarrusso Captain America I got as part of a package deal off his website.

I've tried to get some Ben Dunn pages from Ninja High School off eBay but always got outbid at the last second.

I would love to get one page or a sketch from all of my favourite artists from
when I was a kid. I wrote to Carman Infantino since I heard that he was
doing recreations but they told me that he is getting too old and is not
satisfied with his output to do this anymore. Shame.

Check it out, Mike O'Brien! I own the next page....!!! :)

!! :)