There is no way any page from DKR goes for $1000. 3K minimum. As I stated before. DKR, Watchmen and Killing Joke are the real high end in the art collecting community. Those three books are the ones that "make" someones collection. It has become a status things. Unless those books fall out of favor, pages from those series will keep rising. They may not hit 448K again. However, pages that normally would have run 3K will probably double very soon.

I'm not saying they are "your" anything. I'm not attacking your collection or taste. I'm not even saying I agree with these three as being the holy trinity within art collecting. I am saying that I am cognizant of the fact that they are. Period. You can claim that $1000 should be the ceiling. I am just pointing out the reality. $1000 won't get you any Frank Miller page let alone a DKR page! The ceiling is what people are willing to pay. Which in this case is 448K. If that isn't proof that at least DKR is one of the most in demand titles within art circles I don't know how else to convince you.

If anything, this type of sale shows the wisdom of "holding back" the best pages from the market if one has a real hit comic. And it also shows that it pays to have the art sold by an intermediary.

I don't know who the owner of the piece is, but if Miller or Janson had come out to sell this themselves, they'd have gotten grief over every penny over 1000 dollars they asked for or  received. Imagine the internet backlash against Miller if he had received half a million for that page?

Too many "art traders" think they should be able to get artwork for next to nothing and flip it for "half a million" (Ok, maybe 10-100 dollars profit).

And too many "art traders" get pissed at artists for getting as much as possible for their art. Yet they expext to turn a healthy profit themselves.

It amazes me that the further away from the artist an artwork gets, the more people are willing to pay for it.

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There is no point of comparison between a commission piece and a page of pre-existing art. Too many factors pay into the prices of the existing pieces, factors which can change at a moment's notice, as artists shift in popularity. Commission pieces are also a small enough part of the market as a whole that their prices are not likely to have any effect upon that market. That's not the case for pre-existing original art.

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If you can afford it, why not?

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Exaggerated prices at one end of the spectrum can "trickle down" and end up destroying an entire hobby. Look what happened to comics. An issue of ACTION COMICS sold at auction, more than thirty years ago, for an inflated price which, largely due to misreporting and misunderstanding of the market, became effectively the "gold standard", and soon inflated prices were appearing on more and more comics, until even RECENT product was being jacked up in price.

So far, we have seen only a distant rumbling of this kind of madness in the original art market -- Jim Lee's first issue of X-MEN selling at auction for $40,000, an absurd price, was among the first -- but now we see this. Someone asking $20,000 for a McFarlane SPIDER-MAN page? I've even seen some pretty insane price tags on my own work.

It might be easy enough to dismiss this as just being what the buyer can "afford" -- but that PAWN STARS incident illustrates that it soon becomes what the seller is asking. Selling price and asking price are two very different things, but if too many sellers start asking prices only the megarich can afford, the hobby withers and dies.