Comic Art Estimator

Curious about the value of your original comic book artwork? Use the search below to provide a rough estimate of what your original art might be valued at. Please Read our FAQ to learn how we generate these values, and how to use this research tool. If you're already a Market Data Subscriber you can further research our Auction House and Comic Art Dealer Market Data for more detailed results!

How To Use This Search

We provide you with two keyword fields, a primary and secondary. The simplest way to look at it would be to use the first field for the most important keywords, and the secondary for the less important keywords that might influence the restuls. So for instance, you might put the Artist name in the primary field and the Series Title in the secondary field. Or you might list both Artist and Series Title in the primary field, and list an inker or possibly a comic character in the secondary field. The Art Type field allows you to refine and further influence the results, and is set to All Art Types by default.

About This Estimated Value Report

We search more than 460,000 Online Auction and Comic Art Dealer results since 2001 to genertate the estimate. The historical sales results that make up this estimate are available to our Market Data Subscribers for $75/year. Market Data doesn't just provide historical sales results, it gives Collectors the means to research whether an original artwork has ever been available for sale. We will continue to tweak and modify these results as we gather more data.

The estimates provided by no mean guarantee the value of the artwork you're researching since factors such as characters on a page, the importance of the issue the art is from, or even the condition of the artwork can all increase or decrease the value of your artwork as it relates to these estimates.

A note to our Market Data Subscribers. These same results are not attainable from our current Market Data searches because we use precise matching there to your search terms, not relevancy related results.

How Do We Create This Estimate?

When generating the estimate we look at three fields of data from your artwork - The Title, Art Type, and Artist(s) fields. Because collectors can write almost anything in the Title we cannot gather results that match those words explicitly like we do on most searches on CAF. We first generate a set of results based on those three fields and then establish a Relevancy Rank for each result. Once Ranked, we apply a Threshold for BEST MATCH RESULTS and a second Threshold for GOOD MATCH RESULTS based on our own research. After removing all of the least relevant results outside our Threshold, we then display those BEST and GOOD MATCH RESULTS in a summary format providing an Average Price, along with a Price Range and Date Range for those collected items at each Threshold.

How Accurate Are These Estimates?

The results are only as good as the data we have available to query. For instance, if you own a piece of Cover Art by an artist whose work has rarely sold on the market its more than likely that we'll have more results for less expensive sales from that artist. Therefore you might have to ignore the Average Price we've shown and lean more towards the higher end of the Price Range. Effectively take your own knowledge of the market and use these results we present for what they are, a best guess estimate for your artwork. If you are a Market Data Subscriber you should do more extensive searches in our Online Auction and Dealer Market Data to best determine your own estimate.

How you write your Title is very important to the Summary results, and sometimes if you feel our results should be better you might want to experiment with adjusting your Title. A 'Convention Sketch' of Luke Cage by 'John Romita Jr' might be better titled 'Luke Cage aka Power Man' versus simply 'Power Man' to give our search more information. Similarly, the Art Type 'Commission' might produce more relevant results as compared to 'Convention Sketch'. Spelling is critical as well. We have seen results for Spider-Man art produce next to no results because the Collector left the hyphen out of Spidey's name, ie. 'SpiderMan'.

What Are The Differences Between the Summary Result Sets?

We had to experiment with different search methods in order to come up with a method that on average produced the best results. What follows is a brief outline of how each method works.

Ranked Market Data Results - Best For Unpublished - This method applies weight values to the keywords we send to the search, such that Artist Name(s) are weighted highest, Art Type is in the middle, and Title keywords are the lowest. The search returns a set of Ranked Results that we then apply our own Threshold model to, in order to return the BEST and GOOD MATCH RESULTS. This Summary only includes Online Auction results, and from our view works best for unpublished artworks such as Convention Sketches, Sketch Covers and Commissions. This is not always the case, so if you are researching items that are Published you should still compare the Results from this and the following Summary.

Queried Market Data Results - Best For Published - This method takes all keywords (Artist Name(s), Art Type, and Title) into account equally, and then Ranks results based on a specific database method. We then apply our Threshold model to the Ranks to create the BEST and GOOD MATCH RESULTS. This Summary includes Online Auction and Comic Art Dealer results, and from our view works best for published artworks such as Covers, Splash Pages, Interior Pages and Pin Ups. This is not always the case, so if you are researching items that are Unpublished you should still compare the Results from this and the preceding Summary.

Queried Dealer Art For Sale Search - This Result Summary is provided only from Artwork that is currently For Sale from Comic Art Dealers in our For Sale Search. It is provided as a supplementary set of results for artwork that is currently for sale where a price is present (i.e. no Inquire or Make Offer).