Bill Sienkiewicz, New Mutants issue 23 page 11 (1985)

I have almost no "super heroes" in my original art collection. I used to read them, of course, but at some point I just left the genre and moved to more alternative fare. Those heroes that I do collect tend to be way off mainstream: Badger (insane, in fact an allegory as to the idea that to put on a costume one must be insane); American Flagg! (really a futuristic policeman who rebels against the system) and Nexus (a merciless executioner).

But there is something about the New Mutants run of Bill Sienkiewicz that grabbed and has held my attention for four decades. He only penciled 14 issues (#18 to #31), but beginning with the Demon Bear saga Bill fried my brain and changed my view about what comics could be. My parents had for a time been contemporary art dealers, and in Bill's work I saw the new creativity, vision and voice that could be comics.

I have hesitated for years to buy a page, but I realized I was letting perfect be the enemy of good. I wanted certain specific pages badly, and they either are deep in collections that will not sell or are priced so high as to be unreachable. I was overlooking the basic attraction of the work to me: the genre busting, darkly wrought, stylistic reaches of Bill's art. So last year I saw a great piece at a "reasonable" price and jumped on it. And it is as good as I had hoped - I look at it often.