U.S. 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.
“There are just so many, and it was such a daunting task to figure what to do with them so that they could be out there where people enjoy them too,” said 74-year-old Davis, creator of the comic strip that appears in newspapers around the world and has spawned TV shows, movies and books.
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.
The strips span from the launch of “Garfield” in 1978 to 2011, when Davis began drawing the strip digitally. He says he still draws it by hand but now it’s with a stylus on a tablet instead of on paper with a pencil, pen and brush.
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.”
Brian Wiedman, a comic grader at Heritage, says the daily strips are currently selling on average from around US$500 to US$700, and the longer Sunday strips are selling for US$1,500 to US$3,000.
(SD-Agencies) |