About & methodology

Comic Art Index is a free price guide for original comic art from the "prime era," roughly 1985 to 1995: the years of Frank Miller's Dark Knight, Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man, Jim Lee's X-Men and the early Image boom.

What counts

• Original art (covers, interior pages, splashes, spreads) created between 1985 and 1995.
• Sales that were publicly reported, with the price, the venue, and a date.
• Every row links to the page we checked when adding it. No estimated, asking, or invented prices.

How prices are reported

• Auction prices are shown as reported by the source. Heritage and ComicConnect results generally include the buyer's premium.
• Rows from Heritage auction #7470 (Sept 25–27, 2026) are dated to the auction's closing day; the exact session day for each lot may differ by a day or two.
• The Uncanny X-Men #268 cover sale is dated to the CBR report (Dec 4, 2020).
• The Dark Knight Returns Joker spread is dated to Heritage's Oct 6–8, 2023 event.

Images

We show only a few small, credited thumbnails, each linked to its Heritage Auctions listing. All artwork is © its creators and publishers.

Sources (9)

• Rare Book Hub (Heritage #7470 results) — 79 sales
  https://www.rarebookhub.com/auctions/auction_detail?id=51635&size=500
• ComicArtTracker top prices — 6 sales
  https://comicarttracker.com/auctions/top-prices
• Bleeding Cool — 3 sales
  https://bleedingcool.com/comics/one-page-of-jim-lee-x-men-art-sold-for-over-1-3-of-a-million-last-week/
• Bleeding Cool — 1 sale
  https://bleedingcool.com/comics/todd-mcfarlane-amazing-spider-man-328-original-cover-art-sells-for-record-675250/
• Overstreet Access — 1 sale
  https://www.overstreetaccess.com/frank-miller-dark-knight-returns-pages-reach-550k-at-heritage/
• ICv2 — 1 sale
  https://icv2.com/articles/comics/view/20019/miller-page-goes-448-125
• New York Times — 1 sale
  https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/collector-sense-tingling-comic-book-sale-yields-powerful-prices/
• CBR — 1 sale
  https://www.cbr.com/jim-lee-uncanny-x-men-original-art-auctioned-300k/
• Artdaily (Heritage release) — 1 sale
  https://artdaily.com/news/175930/Deadpool-s-debut-slices-up-the-record-books-as-Rob-Liefeld-s-original-art-from--New-Mutants--No--98-sells-for--960-000-

Data

The full dataset is available as sales.json (94 rows). Spot a missing sale or an error? Corrections are welcome.