Sotheby’s held its first comic strip sale on July 4 in Paris. The sale was very successful, generating $810,700. The event was organized in memory of comic book artist Jean Giraud, also known as Moebius. Internationally famous expert Jean-Marc Thévenet curated the event. He said: “The auction reflects our conviction that comic strips have become an art-form in their own right. In short, the sale aims to be a catalogue raisonné of the first hundred years of comic strips.”
The event saw some really special strips go under the hammer for high prices, including the most expensive original Tintin artwork for The Shooting Star album. The lot almost reached presale estimations (€240,000), when it sold for €234,750 ($290,550). Created in 1941 by famous Belgian artist Georges Remi, aka Hergé, the precious work shows how the soil melts under Snowy’s tiny paws.
In all, there were 100 lots sold at the auction, of which we will mention only a few: “The Crab with the Golden Claws”, which was estimated to sell for as much as $315,000, but which found no interested bidder, an original piece for “The Gorilla Has Done It” from the Robbedoes & Kwabbernoot” series by Franquin ($86,600), and a first edition of Rodolphe Töpffer’s 1833 L’Histoire de M. Jabot . This was the first time Sotheby’s held a sale dedicated entirely to the ‘Bande dessninée’ (comic strips) genre.
