Garfield Gets Hammered (Auctioned)

The Associated Press has picked up the story of Jim Davis and Heritage Auctions offering
The Jim Davis Collection of original Garfield comic strip and specialty and roughs to the public.

Cartoonist Jim Davis is offering up more than 11,000 “Garfield” comic strips hand-drawn on paper in an auction that will stretch into the coming years, with at least a couple of strips featuring the always-hungry orange cat with a sardonic sense of humor available weekly.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions began offering up the strips in August. The auction house is selling two daily strips each week, along with longer Sunday strips being offered during the large-scale auctions throughout the year.

AP reporter Jamie Stengle talked to Cartoonist Jim Davis:

Indiana-based Davis says that over the years he gave some strips to family, friends and staff, while others are on displays at museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, and he even tried selling them on his website for a few years. But he kept most of them, he says, storing them in a fireproof, climate-controlled vault.

The auction, he said, “was just a logical thing to do with an awful lot of comic strips and an opportunity to allow not just collectors but a lot of the fans over the years to have access to the strips as well without me having to send them out one at a time.”

 

Heritage Auctions is offering individual daily and Sunday strips,
but also groupings such as these 5 consecutive 1995 dailies that went for $3600.00:

 

More interesting to me are several offering bundles of roughs.

A package of over 300 preliminaries from 1985 sold for $6000.00.

The Jim Davis/Garfield page at Heritage Auctions will show what has been sold and what is currently up for auction. Heritage Auctions is an honorable site – in the years since I signed up I have never been bothered by them, spamming or otherwise (I occasionally get an auction catalog from them via snail mail). It is well worth the price (FREE!) to get a good look at all kinds of original art and more.

 

Anyhoo…

I recommend getting the first two or three years if you want Jim Davis art, though the art by ghost artists Gary Barker, Eric Reaves, and others are nothing short of slick professionalism.

 

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