A $2.4 Million Art Auction Hints At Collectors' Growing Interest In Retro Sci-Fi Art

Heritage Auctions just had a good week: The Dallas, Texas-based auction house broke multiple records with the auction of a science fiction cover art and book collection that exceeded its pre-auction estimate by more than $1 million to arrive at a total of $2,407,620 and achieve a rare 100% sell-through rate.

Artist James Allen St. John's 1922 book dust jacket for the first edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core was the top lot with a $112,500 sale following bids from more than 30 collectors. St. John's cover art career pioneered the look of heroic fantasy art, directly influencing more famous artists like Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo, so it's nice to see his art receive the highest bid of the auction. The sale broke St. John's previous record to mark his highest sale ever.

A signed work by Frank R. Paul, a Winter 1930 cover for Science Wonder Quarterly, sold for $87,500, breaking Paul's record for his works and almost tripling its pre-auction estimate. Other big sales items included John Conrad Berkey's 1986 Run to the Stars paperback cover, for $42,500; Lawrence Sterne Stevens' 1951 magazine cover Hand from the Void, for $65,625; and Paul Lehr's book cover art to 1997's Infinite Worlds: the Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art, which sold at $38,750, almost eight times its pre-auction estimate.

Is the stellar success of the Glynn and Suzanne Crain Science Fiction Collection Auction an indication of a growing interest in the twentieth century science fiction art that accounted for most of the lots, or just a sign that this particular collection was outstanding? Well, a little of both.

The Crain Collection included plenty of rare and unique items, many of which were only privately traded before debuting at last week's auction. But the auction also saw "scores" of new bidders, according to Heritage, indicating that this sci-fi art was able to draw in parties outside of the usual collectors.

Heritage Auctions Vice President Todd Hignite agrees that retro science fiction art is growing in popularity among collectors. "This imagery is fascinating on many levels, has a wide appeal, and has always been very attractive to collectors," he told me. "I think what the Crain collection did was not only bring out all the biggest collectors in the field, who all realized this was a huge opportunity, but also many new bidders given a real chance to buy A+ examples for the first time."

Granted, some artists have always sold well, like Michael Whelan, a famed artist who has illustrated for authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov since the 70s and continues illustrating for high profile authors including Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson today.

"We do receive a lot of interest in works from the 70s and 80s right along with his newer work," says Mike Jackson, who assists with sales of Whelan's art, before rattling off a series of inquiries he's received just this week.

But even Whelan is seeing higher sales than ever: His 1983 paperback cover art for Asimov's Foundation’s Edge sold at the Crain auction for $68,750, solidly quadripling its estimate and setting a record for Whelan's work.

"You could definitely say that there have been high profile events driving the market," Jackson notes.

Thanks to ebook sales, the genres of science fiction and fantasy have grown massively in the past decade, and the same genres account for an outsized number of blockbuster films and prestige television series. Nostalgia for yesteryear's sci-fi is big, too, driving interest in franchises like Stranger Things or Stephen King's It.

Mix in a little of that retro nostalgia among the generations most likely to have a collector's disposable income, and the rise in vintage science fiction and fantasy art sales makes sense.

Glynn Crain, owner of the collection that just sold for a little over $2.4 million, explained in a recent interview that part of the demand is due to the paintings' ephemeral nature: "Back in the 1930s and ’40s when pulp magazines were flourishing and all these fantastic covers were created, and on into the ’50s, basically the art served one purpose and that was to get photographed by the printer and turned into a printed magazine or book. After that, a lot of it just got tossed. Such a small percentage actually survived. It does make this stuff very rare."

Not all science fiction illustrators are equal, however. "The best examples are going for big money nowadays," Crain said. "A painting that Heritage Auctions sells for $50,000, if you go back 10 or 15 years, you probably could have bought that same painting for $5,000. But it seems to be the very top examples. Average paintings from a paperback in the 1980s or whatever can be had for $2,000, $3,000 or $4,000."

What's driving the surging sci-fi illustration market, in Crain's estimate? Baby Boomer nostalgia. "I think it’s a function of the Baby Boomers who grew up with this stuff," he says. "Maybe they weren’t even collectors at time, in the ’60s, but once they became successful in their careers, they had money, [and] they realized, 'I can recapture these childhood memories, and here’s a piece of Jack Kirby art and I remember this cover when I was a kid.' I think so many of us realized the same thing and started desiring that stuff."

No one knows this better than Heritage: In 2018, the auction house set the world record for the single most expensive piece of original comic book art ever sold at public auction, for legendary fantasy artist Frank Frazetta's 1990 work Death Dealer 6, which sold for $1.79 million.

Then, in May of this year, Heritage broke that year-old record, while setting its own record for the most expensive item ever sold by Heritage Auctions. It was with the sale of Frazetta's 1969 Egyptian Queen. The going price: $5.4 million.