Comic Art Festival offers alternative to trade fair model

Ask the average fine art professional to imagine a comic convention, and their first thoughts will probably go to die-hard fans in elaborate homemade costumes, stalls selling loads of mass-produced merchandise and crowds in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. Standing in stark contrast to this image is the Lake Como Comic Art Festival, an alternative to the typical trade fair, held annually in May purely to honour the original art of comics—a market niche that now sustains legitimately blue-chip resale prices.

Although many outside the trade know that vintage American comics often command six or even seven figures at auction, far fewer people are aware that the same is true of the original hand-drawn art used to produce those four-colour classics. “It has become routine for [single] pages and covers to break $100,000, and it is not unheard of for some desirable pieces to exceed half a million dollars,” says Scott Dunbier, a former special projects editor at IDW Publishing, which focuses on comics and graphic novels, as well as a former dealer in original comic art.

In the US, he notes, works by the underground comic icon Robert Crumb (who for years has been represented by the mega-gallery David Zwirner), have exceeded $700,000, while the original cover art for one revered issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, sketched by Todd McFarlane, went for $657,250 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas in 2012. In fact, Dunbier’s assessment undersells prices at the top end of the market; a hand-drawn page from Marvel’s 1980s comic series Secret Wars sold for a staggering $3.4m at Heritage in January 2022.

Original comic art from outside the US has gone through the roof, too. Two sketches by Hergé, the Belgian creator of Tintin, fetched fee-inclusive prices of €3.2m in January 2021 and €2.1m in February 2023, each at Artcurial in Paris.

For more proof that original comic art is a huge business, look no further than the Lake Como festival. Since its founding in 2018, a select group of comic artists based everywhere from the UK and the US to Europe and Australia have gathered in the elegant Villa Erba to sell their work to—and even create brand new commissions for—collectors who sometimes travel thousands of miles for the chance to meet and buy from their artistic heroes.

Keeping it exclusive

Tickets for Lake Como eclipse their equivalents at even the most prestigious fine-art fairs: a single-day festival pass costs €195, while a two-day pass is €325. For comparison, admission to Art Basel’s flagship event in Switzerland is SFr68 (around €70) for one day and SFr240 (around €250) for the length of the fair. The comic festival’s organisers also cap the number of attendees at 1,000 per year, ensuring that, unlike typical US comic conventions, visitors to Lake Como do not have to battle through hordes of punters to interact with their favourite artists.

For the British comic writer and illustrator Liam Sharp, a guest at the 2023 Lake Como festival whose credits include McFarlane’s Spawn and DC Comics’ The Green Lantern, the event’s appeal is obvious: “Number one is that it’s a rare art-centric show—no other media celebs. Just artists, and the best of the best at that! The second is the location, which is just stunning.”

For its fifth edition, staged from 17-19 May, the festival featured around 70 luminaries of modern comics. They included the US-based artist and illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz, whose work has graced posters for blockbuster films such as Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, John Wick and Black Panther, and whose painterly pieces can go for at least five figures; Charles Vess, an artist for Neil Gaiman’s renowned comic series The Sandman; and British comic illustrator Glenn Fabry, who has worked extensively with Garth Ennis, the creator of Amazon Prime’s hit superhero series The Boys.

A different path

The Lake Como festival was established by the American convention organiser Steve Morger, a promoter of the Big Wow! Comic Fest in San Jose, California, and the French comic showrunner and retailer Arno Lapeyre, one of the forces behind the Paris Comics Expo. Lapeyre tells The Art Newspaper that the idea for Lake Como came out of a desire to create a unique international comic happening.

“Steve was playing with the idea of an event entirely focused on comic art and artists, which was something that was really appealing to me as well. As much as I loved doing Paris Comics Expo and Steve enjoyed Big Wow!, our passion has always been for the art and the comic book medium. Cosplay and TV celebrities fit into bigger and more family-oriented shows, but we had no real interest in these aspects.”

As a result, the Lake Como Comic Art Festival has become the vanguard of a distinctive movement often overshadowed by the larger fine art trade. Yet the demand from collectors of this genre should keep original comic art on an upward commercial trajectory for some time to come.

“This market is driven by the nostalgia of beloved childhood memories,” Dunbier says. “At the [current] rate of expansion, there is no way of predicting how high prices will go.”