Over at CBR’s OFO Erik Larsen talks about why he stopped doing art at conventions and his thoughts on collecting art. Some things I found interesting:

I also did sketches at cons and sold those. I did sketches for years and as much as folks may have liked having me draw them, it really took the fun out of conventions. Sure, it was nice to get a couple bucks to buy back issues with, but it made the shows a grueling experience. Cons were work and I’d leave them with a swimming head and numb fingers.

I stopped doing sketches at shows after a fan had brought the drawing I’d done for him the previous year, nicely matted and framed.

It was hideous.

It was an awful drawing. Distorted, ugly, poorly composed and horrific. The thought of this beastly monstrosity gracing somebody’s wall made me stop cold turkey. I didn’t do sketches at cons for years.

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The troubling thing about some art on the market, however, is that it was not necessarily obtained ethically.

Much of it was stolen.

Art from the early days at Marvel, in particular, was routinely purloined. Years after the work was done, art that had been stored and saved was swiped and often sold by the people that worked in the Marvel offices (and people that visited the Marvel offices).

It’s pretty safe to say that every page of Steve Ditko art on the market was stolen. Ditko doesn’t sell his art. And as far as I know - he doesn’t give it away. He just keeps it in heaps in his studio. There’s a well-circulated tale of a certain comic book inker and historian who visited Ditko and was alarmed to find that he was using old pages as a cutting board!

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One of the unfortunate fallouts of the web and its message boards is that readers get access to too much information. What should really influence a reader’s decision to purchase a comic book is how much they enjoy it, not whether they like somebody or not.

Thanks to the Internet, we now have all kinds of reasons to pick apart creators’ integrity and boycott their work for reasons other than what’s on the printed page and that’s unfortunate.

The fact that this individual bought some original art at an auction really should not affect how much a reader enjoys his work on the books he works on. The two are mutually exclusive, really - or they should be.

But I guess it’s the nature of the beast.

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I started doing quick head sketches for free.

I don’t do them all the time and I don’t do them if I’m tired or burned out, but since I don’t sell “Savage Dragon” pages I thought it would be nice to give those that support me something and because they’re free I don’t mind so much if they suck. At least I didn’t take anybody’s money.

There was a flurry of folks selling my sketches on eBay and I felt a bit betrayed by that. I’d overheard a fan talking about hoping to “make back the money” he’d spent to go to the show - as if the rest of us were somehow being paid to be away from our friends and family and were getting our airfares and hotel rooms paid for. That bugged me.

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