Tales of Accumulation & Excess the Incredible Adventures of the Collector

So one evening in 1997, a comic-book artwork restorer named Rick returned to me a piece I'd sent him more than a year earlier. He returned it only under duress. More precisely, he was limping and had a black eye.

When I'd given him the cover of Captain America #117--which featured the initial appearance of one of the first African American superheroes, the Falcon--he said he would have it back in three weeks. Three weeks became six, then a year, and then I got a phone call from someone who trafficked in comic-book-artwork rumors. Rick, I was quietly informed, had been helping himself to some of the pieces with which he'd been entrusted, and he'd finally taken high-end material from a man who had ugly connections, a man who now owned Rick. If I wanted my art back, I should call a phone number with an area code encompassing a somewhat northern area of New Jersey.

When I did so, a polite voice on the other end told me I'd get my art back in 48 hours. "We simply have to remind Rick he can be touched," the voice explained. Click.

And so Rick showed up at my neighborhood Starbucks two days later holding the newly restored Captain America cover in its Mylar sleeve, looking as if he was about to cry and turning his black eye away from me.

"They said they were going to break my legs," he whispered. "Please don't call them again." I assured him I wouldn't. But for me it was in one ear and out the other: The important thing was that he'd removed the glue residue and staining from my artwork.

As he limped to his car, I kept holding the cover up to the cafe lights to admire it. Great cover. Subtle Gene Colan pencils, bold Joe Sinnott inks, dramatic staging of the Falcon, Cap and some low-rent villains. Absolutely worth the thousand bucks it had cost in the first place, the $200 to restore it and the efforts I'd made to get it back.

When I told my girlfriend about all this, she was horrified. I'd found out that the black eye wasn't because of my phone call but had appeared courtesy of yet another client whose stuff Rick had stolen, but she wasn't mollified. "What are you getting yourself into?" she asked, and I couldn't exactly answer her.

USA Today once published a pie chart showing what keeps people up at night--career worries, their children's future. I couldn't sleep some nights because I wondered where all the pre-1965 twice-up Marvel Comics covers were. Why wouldn't Walt Simonson sell his Thor art? Why did only unpublished H.G. Peter Wonder Woman pages turn up?

For reasons not entirely explicable, I buy, sell and trade the artwork from comic books. This is embarrassing. I would like to pretend the embarrassment is mitigated by the new respect paid to comics via Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Art Spiegelman's Maus, but citing those names is rather like rattling off champagne vintages in some half-slurred defense of my prone position in the local gutter. Tom Field, a friend who thought he could stop collecting after buying one Tomb of Dracula page (he now has 175 of them), has quantified the hobby for me: Comic books, even rare ones, exist in multiple copies. But there's only one of each page of original artwork. If comic books are like cocaine, artwork is like crack.

For years, when a comic artist sat down at his table, the drawings he penciled and inked were valued only until the funnies were printed; then they could be discarded or, as King Features allegedly did with Prince Valiant artwork, used to plug a leaky roof. Over the years, employees spirited thousands of pages out of publishers' warehouses, either because they loved the stuff or because they realized they could sell it to a slowly growing fan base. By the mid-1970s, when comics themselves were becoming valuable, artists got their work back contractually and sold it to people like me.

My origin story, lame by any standard, fits the pattern of my peers. I read comic books from 1972 to 1977, from the age of eight to the age of 13, when my parents' divorce was at its most ruthless. The three-second psychoanalysis is exactly correct: I remember those four-color funny books as friendly islands of solace during painful times. When I shuttled to my father's new home in Chicago and he held hands with his new wife, it was easier for me to pay strict attention to the latest Marvel Treasury Edition. When I was back in San Francisco and my mother was out on a date, I would stay up reading and rereading the gloomy and unsettling Giant-Size Man Thing #4 until I heard her key in the lock, and then I'd slap off the light and pretend to be asleep.

I did odd jobs and collected soda bottles in the summer of 1977, and in August of that year I went to a comic-book convention and bought page 30 of Fantastic Four #183 for $12. And there the awful slope began. By 1997 I was buying up to $9,000 worth of art at a time. I should mention that I was a graduate student then, making $12,000 a year. I managed because I had an outstanding talent for playing credit cards--I was the John Coltrane of balance transfers.

Though this is clearly insane, my father has always understood it. Dad--who at the age of 73 cruises eBay for scientific instruments, watches and slide rules--has passed to me whatever defective gene treasures material things above the company of people. But collecting never actually makes you happy, except for a moment. All collectors, including myself, are programmed to forget this at key moments, such as when a new object appears before our now occluded vision. Right before doing a deal, we have the anxiety, the sweaty palms, the desire. After the deal there's the swaggering feeling of having bagged a trophy: the careful admiration of the pen work, the drafting, the heroic poses, the subtle details--half-erased pencil marks, margin notes, the Comics Code Authority stamp--and the production detritus such as Wite-Out, pasteups, "continued page after next" stats, the coffee-like stain of printer's ink. And then, when it goes into your portfolio or onto the wall, there's this creeping urge, a need for more. It's a little like the most (continued on page 200)Collector(continued from page 125) shameful side of sex. When a man buys art from me and has it shipped to his office, he's usually hiding it from his wife, as though it were a mistress. At comic-book conventions, you can spot the collector who has completely displaced his desires, the guy who cranes his neck to look past the gorgeous women in scanty costumes to better see the display of Sunday Pogo pages.

Such sightings are few lately, as the Internet has supplanted the convention floor. The online Comicart-1 discussion group has more than 1,700 members, and we swoon over, or seethe about, one another's acquisitions. There is boasting and swaggering and jealousy and the occasional burst of camaraderie, all done via unbreachable virtual intimacy. The most pathetic moments occur when collectors try to share tangential passions--for model trains, animation cels or (as I once mistakenly did) old magic posters. There follows some polite response, but a pall hangs over the discussion, as if someone in a perfectly good leg-fetish forum had said, "Hey, guys, what about jugs?"

I once asked if anyone bought art not because they wanted to but because they felt they needed to buy something. You could almost hear online crickets chirping.

•

My best friend in this racket is Will Gabri-El, 34, whom I've known for a decade. We've never met. Maybe that's hard to imagine if you're not a collector, but we don't need to meet--I know how he does deals, and that's a full Rorschach personality test. He's got a calm demeanor, speaks carefully, can do long division in his head and plays his cards close to his chest. It took me years just to find out what he looks like (he turns out to be a handsome guy in the mode of Prince). He enjoys standing in the shadows, quietly helping people make deals from the sidelines, though his online persona is aggressive, especially when it comes to John Byrne artwork. He reminds me of my cousin, who is as gentle and calm as a Zen master until someone stands between him and his morning cigarette.

Will and I are friends because we egg on each other's obsessions. In one six-month period I called every comic-book store in 24 states, about 1,000 places. I found three pieces of art, and though you might think I was an idiot--1,000 phone calls?--I received heartfelt congratulations from Will: Three pieces! Cool! In return I encourage him when he's spending three or four times the going amount, crazy money, on pages from Fantastic Four #243. "Will, what are you going to do? It's Galactus versus everybody. You gotta have it, man."

Bragging rights evolve from the difficulty of a deal, the intransigence of the seller, the hoops through which people jump. Mike Burkey, the world's foremost collector of Spider-Man artwork, a guy who is single-minded even by my standards, loves the artist John Romita and wants to own at least one page of artwork from every issue from Romita's heyday, Amazing Spider-Man #39--132. Another collector had the complete Amazing Spider-Man #121 (the death of Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy), which at the time was worth about $3,000. The collector would sell only if Burkey located and gave him a specific $10,000 piece of art available only as part of a $50,000 package.

For the deal itself, Burkey drove eight hours from Ohio to New York, then his car--rather, his father's car--broke down, then Burkey borrowed a car from the guy he was doing the deal with, got lost in a blizzard on the way home, plowed into a snowbank, ended up snowed in at a motel, called in sick to work for four days and paid $2,000 for a new transmission. But now Burkey has the complete Amazing Spider-Man #121. "That was my best deal," he tells me.

Burkey exemplifies the terrible balance between loving stuff and loving people. Recently he e-mailed to Comicart-1 a chilling note about his engagement and its doom. Two months before the wedding day, the girl dumped him, cleaned out his bank accounts and sold a house he'd helped restore. She then married another guy--on the very day she had planned to marry Burkey. But Burkey didn't feel too embittered toward her, because a certain line was never crossed: "If we'd gotten married," he wrote, "and she tried to take any part of my Spider-Man collection, the kid gloves would have come off! Seriously!"

On the non-wedding day, his family took him out to nurse his wounds. "I decided to call John Romita on my cell phone, and my entire family and a few friends all got to talk to him one by one for about 45 minutes total! It was a blast!"

•

Somehow, though, the relief Burkey felt while talking to his hero makes me queasy. What's the moral of a story that begins with a woman dumping you and ends with your passing a cell phone around so your family can talk to the man who drew the funny books you read as a child? It seems like the outer edges of a bog that Swamp Thing himself would find depressing.

A couple of years ago the downside of this hobby started bothering me. The bright sparks I felt when acquiring artwork didn't help. I kept thinking about the emptiness I saw in some of my peers' eyes, about how one guy had a dealer meet him at his current residence, a homeless shelter.

My father sent me a copy of Werner Muensterberger's Collecting: An Unruly Passion, a psychoanalytic treatise on collectors. I found it devastating. Muensterberger argues that, for collectors, items become invested with mana, or magical power, the way a teddy bear or any transitional object does for a child. Teddy won't leave you when Mom does. Teddy will protect you from the darkness. Eventually, since people--like Burkey's ex-fiancée--fail you, having the best damned teddy bear on the block can be your reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Muensterberger concludes that, regardless of what is being collected, "the objects are all ultimate, often unconscious, assurances against despair and loneliness." And unfortunately, no stockpile of bears is ever good enough. The despair always returns.

Viewed through that black lens, the discussions on Comicart-1 veer past the pathetic and into the bleak. Around Christmastime last year, a San Francisco collector named Bill Howard announced it was his 49th birthday, a celebration made melancholy by his chronic lymphocytic leukemia: "I get to spend the day with the drip, drip, drip of chemo, but what the heck. I'm still kickin', and there's always Comic-1 to help relieve the days of recovery."

There was a funereal gloom to this, and as I read the respectful responses, they felt like condolence cards, black-bordered announcements. No matter how much art you owned, you couldn't turn back your mortality. It was a grim day.

But then a guy named Jon Mankuta posted a response: "Happy birthday, buddyyyy! I've taken your house key...and I sealed off your garage and filled it with Jell-O, so we have a wrestling ring. Candy and Tanya installed a trapeze over your new vibrating, heart-shaped water bed. In the kitchen, there's a big cage filled with 43 ferrets. Be carefull [sic], they've been dipped up to their necks in warm vasaline [sic] (I'll get to that later...)."

And so on. Mankuta, a frequent poster to the list, had outdone himself. Midgets, dildos, Hostess Twinkies--a long-winded dumb joke whose vitality was so wrong it was right. His jolly giving the finger to death shook me up. Maybe I was wrong to think the hobby was a kind of pathology. Maybe it was just fun, and the addiction and the 12-stepping was my gilding the psychological lily, finding problems where no problems actually existed.

•

Which brings me in a larger way to Mankuta, whom, God help me, I envy in a certain way. I've met him numerous times, and he's hard to ignore. He's an absurd clotheshorse, sporting pirate shirts and trendy pants. His looks are average (his most defining characteristic is his relatively curly, preened-over black hair), but he has the confidence of a rock star. We on Comicart-1 know each and every detail of his love life. He dates strippers and has "friendships with benefits" with various other women. We've heard how, when he brings a woman to his home in his Porsche 928S, she sees on arrival a Mercedes CLK 320 coupe in the driveway of a nearly all-glass house that, to Mankuta's eyes, is rather like a starship. But I do not envy him his sartorial splendor, his cars or his women.

No, the key to Mankuta is in his house, for when he has a woman over she lies in a bed flanked by six-foot posters of 1940s comic-book covers. Mankuta made them himself, cutting and pasting blown-up photocopies to create life-size Spectre, Doctor Fate and Sub-Mariner figures. And in the closet is the heart of his passion: portfolios stuffed with 400 pieces of original comic-book artwork.

Yet even this isn't what I envy the most about him--it's his attitude. Mankuta is a man profoundly untroubled by anything.

When I've gone to the San Diego Comic Book Convention, I've increasingly watched Mankuta as if he were my alter ego. He is always good-natured, juvenile and relentlessly self-promoting. Walking through crowds as if flashbulbs were going off in his face, he pulls out his portfolio, usually with some idiotic quip and an eye on some slinky babe across the room dressed as Vampirella. Unlike most collectors, he sees the women and--holy moley!--even talks to them. (His banter is idiotic but sincere; for reasons I don't claim to understand, at least one woman in 20 seems to respond well.) He has no worries about spending four hours at a time standing in front of a folding table, trying like hell to trade two Shogun Warriors covers for a Herb Trimpe Hulk cover so he can turn it around and get that Godzilla cover off someone else.

I can't help wondering, Is it possible that Mankuta, who calls himself the David Lee Roth of comic-book collecting, actually does this with the same angst that I do?

That just doesn't seem likely.

He is eager to be studied, explaining to me that, first, attention in a national magazine will alert people to his want list, and second, he figures it can advance his acting career. One evening on the phone, I read Mankuta a quotation from Muensterberger about controlling loss and despair. It's like talking to my dog. On the other side of the conversation is a friendly intelligence that in no way speaks my language. "No," he finally says, "I don't look at my art that way. I remember where I was when I bought the comic and it brings back the flood of good memories. What could be more golden than childhood?"

Maybe not living with your parents? You see, Mankuta--leaning hard on 30 years old, the David Lee Roth of comic-artwork collectors--still lives with his mother and father.

This last detail seems like the graceless capper to the life of an über-nerd--granted, a sexually successful über-nerd--but there's a little more to this story than a guy just trying to save rent money to pursue his obsession.

Once upon a time Mankuta lived in New York City's West Village. He moved back home and pays the mortgage because his parents are terribly ill. His father has diabetes so advanced that pieces of his foot have been amputated. His mother has leukemia.

It sounds grim. He says, as if he tells himself this a lot, that at least his parents give him more privacy than his roommates in the Village did. Still, he's been wondering what it would be like to own property. "Something in Los Angeles, maybe," he says. "My aunt and uncle bought something in Florida with a big pool and palm trees in the backyard, and I keep thinking about it."

•

The keys to this dream are in Mankuta's hands.

The highest prices are paid for "historic" pieces, the birth or death of a character or other milestone events. And while calling the origin of Matter-Eater Lad historic might be demeaning to the Battle of Gettysburg, it does command the cash.

So what then is the ultimate historical artwork? In 1985, DC's 50th anniversary, a 12-issue adventure called Crisis on Infinite Earths reduced all the parallel Earths (a staple of science fiction) to but one world, wiping out 50 years of continuity and starting over. This thinned out the herd of multiple Supermen, Batmen, et al., generally combining them rather than resorting to murder. The key moment, however, came when the one and only Supergirl was killed. As in killed and doesn't come back.

The cover of #7, by George Pérez, with Superman crying and holding Supergirl's lifeless body, hits all the notes: It isn't just memorable and historic, it's a striking image reminiscent in its own pop-culture way of Michelangelo's Pietà. It's been used on dozens of other covers as homages, rip-offs, parodies. And just about any superhero collector would rank it, for its combination of nostalgia value, significance, emotional impact and aesthetics, as the ultimate prize, the Holy Grail.

Lord knows Jonathan Mankuta wanted it. Amazingly, one of his earliest deals, in 1997, was for all 12 covers of Crisis on Infinite Earths, including #7. He paid roughly $6,000--a steal even then.

People in the hobby have an escalating idea of prices: a lowball price, then fair market, then a high auction price, then crazy money or stupid money, something only an idiot would pay. Far off in the clouds, way above that, is life-changing money.

Mankuta tells me, "Right after I got the Crisis covers, a guy asked, 'What would it take for you to sell them?' I said $100,000." But the guy couldn't come up with it. Later another guy said the same thing: "What would it take?" Mankuta told him $125,000. When this guy was ready to pull the trigger, Mankuta got cold feet. There were certain covers he couldn't imagine living without.

"They're like his lifeblood," says Will Gabri-El, the third person to ask the magic question. And as in all good stories, the third time was the charm. "What would it take?"

"I told him $150,000," says Mankuta. "That's half a house."

It was also too rich for Will. But he didn't say no, because that's not his way. I have done phone autopsies with Will of deals I screwed up, and he always has instant, quiet, John Madden--perfect color play on what I could have done. To close a deal, Will has patience and persistence and can think three steps ahead, which came in handy with Mankuta.

It took a couple of years. They started e-mailing and phoning each other with trade and cash counterproposals. Will says, "Jon was friendly, but sometimes he'd say stuff like 'I'd rather whore my mom than sell this piece.' And his mom would be right there in the room."

Ultimately Mankuta couldn't stand to give up #7, the death of Supergirl. He pulled it back and kept it and a few others. He threw in some substitutions instead, and in late 2002 they came to an agreement. Will had a year to pay it off.

The final price?

Will is, as usual, circumspect. "It might not be good for the market," he finally says, "to let those numbers out." It was nowhere near the asking price, but it was new territory for Pérez. Still enough to make a down payment on a house? Oh yeah, and then some.

The withholding of #7 caused Will some distress; successfully prying it from Mankuta would have been a terrific difficult-deal story, the kind of thing the rest of us would have shaken our heads at and slapped Will on the back for, telling him that cover was rightfully his. And what would it have been valued at--$50,000, $75,000? Hard to say.

Mankuta says something I accept at first: "No amount Will could offer me could get me to part with it. The #7 is more important than money." But as I think about it, the phrase begins to strike me as some kind of open-sesame to understanding why he was really keeping it.

After I read Muensterberger's book on collecting, I had a dark night of the soul, one of those nights that last about three weeks. I went back to my art portfolio with a critical eye. It seemed like a sprinkle of diamonds cast among a ton of cinder blocks. Some pieces pleased me aesthetically--there's something attractive about the joining of words and pictures to form a narrative. But others were clearly inferior--dead space, sloppy inking, placeholders. Here was my 1921 George Herriman Krazy Kat, a stellar example of a strip whose artistic lines Picasso and James Joyce admired, but here also was a late Howard the Duck wash page by a writer and an artist I didn't like, from a story I'd never read and that I'd bought because, at the moment, I'd needed it. It was as plain as the difference between sipping a 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild and drinking it down to the stem of the glass, urgently finishing the bottle.

The final arbiter was my wife, whose Episcopalian good taste my hobby had challenged long enough. She recommended keeping the Edward Gorey, the Lynda Barry and some of the Kirbys but for God's sake to thin out the stuff whose nostalgic value outweighed its artistic merit. My grip slowly relaxed. I sold more than half my collection, and I haven't regretted a single departure. God bless eBay. God bless other people's nostalgia.

I continue collecting but not in the same way. I sell more than I buy. I don't have that fever when I go to a convention. Sometimes when I'm feeling stress, I find myself cruising eBay the way a binge eater pages through the Williams-Sonoma catalog. But I catch myself. Usually. I wrestle with each purchase as if it were the one that could send me off the ledge and back into the pit.

Twelve pieces of artwork hang in my office. Each has a reason for being there. For instance, right over my desk is a Jack Kirby collage in which Mister Fantastic, floating over a weird geometric planet, is saying, "I've done it!! I'm drifting into a world of limitless dimensions!!" Which is exactly how I like to feel when writing. Below it is a Gene Colan splash with Doctor Strange helpless and paralyzed in a maelstrom; the text tells us only that "planet Earth is no more." This is too often how I feel when writing.

Puzzling over the emotional resonance art has, I make a phone call to Mankuta one night. We have an oddly personal conversation; though I've known him for years as a collector, the fact that I'm writing an article has made him eager to expose every detail of his life. His favorite TV show at the moment is Survivor, and the idea of that kind of warts-and-all attention is arousing for him. "Ask me anything," he says. "No, really. Really."

It turns out he hasn't used the Crisis money to buy a house, though it seems to be well on its way to spent. He's thinking of selling something else, and this time he's sure he'll use the money to buy property, but he hasn't really nailed down any specifics yet.

After some light chat, with Mankuta doing silly character--he hopes for a career in voice-over work--I burrow down without much grace and ask, as carefully as I can, "When did you find out your mother had leukemia?"

His voice changes. It becomes less cocky and more strained as he tells me the sad story of where she told him: at the Honda dealership where he worked. She wore sunglasses; he could see her crying; it tore him up. But he can't pinpoint a year. "Nineteen ninety-six? Maybe."

"And when did you start collecting art?"

He can't remember this, though he's told me a few times already: 1996. We talk it through until the chronology is right. She told him, he moved back home, and he almost immediately started collecting artwork. But he really doesn't see a connection.

All he knows is that his mother's leukemia is even worse than the death of his dog. "He was the closest thing I had to a brother. He died in my arms," he says. "He was a Dobie-coonhound mix--looked like Krypto," he adds, referring to Superboy's dog.

"What was his name?"

"Krypto." He pauses here. This is a different Mankuta from the one I've been talking to. He's definitely shaken by this. "You know what's ironic? My dog died in my arms the day after Superman died in the comics. That was so fucked-up. That was literally the worst moment in my life. My best friend."

I can see it clearly--his cradling the poor dog, the raw emotion on his face, the loss, the utter desolation--and I realize I can visualize it very well indeed. Chilled, I ask, "Is it coincidence or something more that you love Crisis #7 so much?"

"What do you mean?"

"What's on that cover?"

There is a long pause, a rare thing when talking to Mankuta. "I never even thought about it. Wow, that's amazing." He's talking now as much for himself as for me. "I'm looking at the art right now. Superman is devastated, and his world has crumbled, and that's all I could think of: This dog was such a sweetheart. Why is he suffering? Please, Lord, take him quietly. I was selfish because I wasn't willing to let him go when the doctor said, 'Let me put him to sleep.' I said, 'There's always hope.' And because of that, I caused my best friend to have a painful death in my arms. I would give up everything I own to spare him that pain."

There's a quiet moment here, and it's awkward for both of us. Then he puts me on the phone with his mother, Berta.

She's sweet and funny and a bit shy. She thinks the world of her son. "He looks like a rock-and-roll guy," she says, "and he dresses flashy, I guess. He goes with a lot of different girls. But he's the sweetest guy inside. I don't think he's interested in settling down with a family the way I hope he would." She pauses. "He can do any voice. And he's not ashamed to do them for anyone." She laughs in a way that announces she's self-aware, that she knows how her son might come off, but she loves him anyway.

Her medication, Gleevic, is working wonders. She's off the interferon, so things are okay. We say good night, and I hurry off the phone.

It's dark in my office. I think a bit about Superman, the last son of the destroyed planet Krypton. An only child, like Mankuta, but he's also an orphan. And that word, orphan, won't go away right now. There's Superman on the cover of Crisis #7, cradling in his arms Supergirl--Kara, his only relative--realizing that now he is the sole survivor of his race and completely alone in the universe in a way none of us could understand.

I try to see the art through Mankuta's eyes, and I find not just the past but what might be coming. The cover is a talisman and a life raft. It is literally priceless. It's like a ritual Day of the Dead painting of skeletons by an artist attempting to control death--only in this case with an even tighter fist, because Mankuta actually owns it. The problems Mankuta has already suffered are hard enough, but he is banking against far more intimate losses, and no amount of crazy money can buy that kind of hope.