My husband is the curator of the Cartoon Art Museum, so it was probably inevitable that we'd start accumulating our own collection of original comic art. Once you've handled enough pieces and talked to enough collectors, you start thinking, "Hey! Why don't I own any watercolor portraits of Carnage?" Also, we started running out of comic books to give each other for Christmases and birthdays, and art is such a classy gift.

Original comic art occupies a nebulous position as "art": it's really just a transitional step toward the finished work, a printed comic book, but it's the step where the artist's hand touched the paper, the place where the art "happened." Collecting art, like collecting comic books, has its complications: a lot of original art doesn't survive, either because it was thrown out or because the artist used materials that decayed quickly; many current artists do all or most of their work on the computer and don't produce finished physical art; and prices are all over the place because no one really knows how much this stuff is "worth." I've seen serious collectors at the San Diego Comic-Con sitting on the floor after hours, spreading out piles of Silver Age Spider-Man pages and swapping them like baseball cards.

I'm not a serious collector. Most of the pieces I own have more sentimental than Comic-Con value. Still, my husband and I have reached the official point at which you know you have a problem: we now own more art than we can fit on our walls. Our apartment's very tiny, but it's still a little unnerving.

But banish the reality of our cramped bohemian hovel from your imagination. As I walk you through a survey of some of the highlights of our collection, I beg you to picture a setting worthy of the work: vaulted ceilings, dark woods, an overall "Night Gallery" effect. I shall wear a silk dressing gown and carry a pipe, much like my fellow aesthete, art patron and mediocre cartoonist Hugh Hefner. I may have a Playmate or two on my arm, or possibly a couple of Girlamatic.com cartoonists. The important thing is to set the mood…

Bone sketch by Jeff Smith
My first piece of comic art. I won this beautiful pen-and-ink drawing of the Bone cousins for naming Bartleby, the baby rat creature, when I was a college student. Thank you, I'm awesome. I learned of my victory when a Bone fan in Russia emailed me to ask if I was interested in selling the sketch. How a guy in Russia managed to get the latest issue of Bone, track down my email address and contact me before Cartoon Books could even give me a call remains something of a mystery, but I wouldn't have dreamed of selling. I'm told that Jeff Smith doesn't often part with his originals, so I'm lucky to have this (although I sometimes run into people who own Bone pages, mostly those damn Pixar animators, who get away with everything).

Page from The Sands by Tom Hart
The Sands was one of the first indie comics I ever read, thanks to a recommendation in the "Palmer's Picks" column in Wizard (and say what you will about Wizard in the '90s, which was indeed the slavering, Venom-like maw of Comic-Book Hell itself, Palmer sure knew how to pick 'em). Years later, I found myself collaborating with Tom Hart on a webcomic called Trunktown, which we did together for about a year. Tom sent me this page when we started work. It's a scene in which Fen the porter, who also appears in Trunktown, sells the protagonist some Jewish hair as a delicacy. Maybe you have to see it in context. It's one of the best gifts I've ever received, but, at the risk of getting irredeemably sappy, it pales in comparison to the gift of working with Tom and learning the ins and outs of comics with him.

Page from Fleep by Jason Shiga
Shiga gave us the first page of his mind-bending comic Fleep as a wedding present, and, even though we suspect he plucked it off his own wall on the way to the reception, we're deeply touched and grateful. The first page consists of five silent panels of a phone booth, first from the outside and then from the inside. We once saw Shiga do a live reading of Fleep during which he read the page thusly: "Phone. Phone. Phone. Enohp. Enohp."

Cover from Duncan's Kingdom #1, by Derek Kirk Kim
Years ago, I tried to buy art from Duncan's Kingdom, written by Gene Yang and drawn by the artist then known only as Derek Kirk, before I had met either cartoonist. I never succeeded in buying the page that I wanted because Derek couldn't dig it out of his mom's closet in Pacifica. In retrospect, this was probably a bad sign. Nonetheless, I later became friends with both Derek and Gene, and eventually Derek gave me the cover art for Duncan's Kingdom #1 as a birthday present to make up for that failed transaction of the past (that, and he probably didn't feel like digging my real present out of his mom's closet). Score! This artwork was totally worth the hassle of being friends with Derek and Gene for all those years.

Page from Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth #10 by Jack Kirby
You can get art by the Silver Age greats relatively cheap (well, under $500) if you're willing to settle for pages without name-brand superheroes on them. In the case of Jack Kirby, I'm more than willing. Andrew and I both love Kirby's off-the-rails nutso later work, so I splurged and got Andrew a page from his favorite issue of Kamandi, the one where the characters are trapped between an evil telekinetic fetus, a giant germ and an army of screaming man-bats. Sadly, I couldn't score a page with visible man-bats. But still.

Page from Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic Book, by Evan Dorkin
Evan Dorkin often sells his non-Milk and Cheese art absurdly cheap, which is how we got this page of a mob attacking Bill and Ted's phone booth. Andrew and I are both big admirers of Dorkin's work, and I regard the Bill and Ted movies as personal gospel, so we snatched this up and hung it in the hall next to our spinner rack. When, at some point in the unforeseeable post-subprime future, we buy a house, the Bill and Ted page is going in the den.

And yes, of course I have a spinner rack in my hall. What am I, a farmer?

Page from Classics Illustrated: Through the Looking-Glass by Kyle Baker
Word on the street says it's hard to get Kyle Baker art in primo condition, thanks to Baker's fondness for drawing with Sharpies and similarly cheap materials; a lot of the pages from Why I Hate Saturn are faded all to hell. Nowadays, he assembles his comics on the computer and doesn't produce physical art beyond sketches on copy paper, so there's not much of his work you can frame and hang on a wall, should you be so inclined. But he's one of Andrew's favorite cartoonists, so I got him this watercolor page from Baker's adaptation of Through the Looking-Glass. (In all honesty, it was also a present for me, both as a Kyle Baker fan and as someone who digs Lewis Carroll hardcore.) It's the scene with the Lion and the Unicorn, both looking awesome, and also a little like characters Andrew would draw, which was another reason I bought it. Aggravatingly, Baker was in his early 20s when he painted this lovely comic, so the page hangs over our TV as a constant reminder of our own craven inadequacy as cartoonists.

Page from Good as Lily by Jesse Hamm
More art by our friends; Good as Lily was one of the Minx graphic novel launch titles, written by Derek Kirk Kim and drawn by Jesse Hamm, both of whom broke my heart by moving to Portland so I can't go to bad superhero movies with them anymore. It was vitally important that Andrew and I acquire this particular page, since Jesse drew us into the first panel, egging on a high school food fight in classic John Hughes style. (Kismet: the cartoon Andrew is wearing a Kamandi T-shirt!) Jason Shiga gets a cameo at the bottom of the page, so we hung it over the page from Fleep.

Page from the 2005 Marvel Holiday Special by Roger Langridge
My first Marvel comic: a short Christmas story written by Andrew and me, drawn by Roger Langridge, one of my favorite living cartoonists, and inked by veteran inker and local raconteur Al Gordon. My career with Marvel has thus far been brief and limited almost entirely to Holiday Specials, but I started on the highest of possible high notes, writing a story about the Fantastic Four and the Moleman to be immortalized in ink by two good friends. The page Andrew secured for me has the Thing meeting the Moleman's grandma, whom we referred to in the script as "Mole-Gran." The page is signed by both Roger and Al, with Roger penning this tiny poem in the margin:

To anyone interested in owning original comic art, I recommend the hell out of Roger Langridge. He sells his pages way too cheap, he fills in all the spot blacks and stuff for you, and, of course, he draws like a mother. The man is a class act.

Page from Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
My best Christmas present this past year. Linda Medley's work was included in a recent show at the Cartoon Art Museum, and afterwards Andrew bought one of the pages from her. It's from issue two, with Lady Jain's arrival at the castle. And it's from when Medley was still pasting in the dialogue by hand, so it's got all the word balloons. I confess to preferring art with word balloons, which is increasingly rare now that it's so much easier to do all the lettering digitally.

Incredible Change-Bots sketch by Jeffrey Brown
This is pretty neat. Andrew enjoyed Jeffrey Brown's Transformers pastiche The Incredible Change-Bots! so much that he joined the fan club advertised in the back of the comic. For $20, he got a minicomic, a membership card and a color sketch of the Change-Bot of his choice (Shootertron, for the curious). He wants to frame it together with his membership card. He's so happy. Thank you, Jeffrey Brown!

Approximately 1,500 Narbonic strips
It's my fault for drawing them. Anybody want some original art, cheap?

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