2023 Fleer Ultra Marvel Midnight Sons Card #49 Kitty Pryde by Simone Bianchi

The nice thing about Heritage is that they usually post previews for the signature auctions well before the auction assuming that I look at the catalog far enough in advance and not the day before like a certain art dealer does. Luckily I saw this with plenty of time to prepare and research what Bianchi card art goes for on the DiTullio Art Collective. At which point I almost gagged. I thought that Alex Ross was the high water mark for modern, painted comic art. Oh well, it's not like they put Kitty into every card set and that the art actually comes up for sale.

Which leads to the thought: Why is she even in this card set? It's called Midnight Sons, so that's the supernatural Marvel characters (usually). Sure she took out the N'Garai demon by herself back in Uncanny X-Men #143 and Excalibur did take part in the Inferno event, but that is all more supernatural adjacent to me. Whatever, it's still cool to have her in the card set.

Plus it came with the prelim sketch as well as a graded copy of the autographed card. Bonus points for it looking like she's coming out of one of those egg/rock things that popped up frequently in Kay Sage's surrealistic, alien, blasted, apocalyptic landscape paintings in this piece.

For a trading card, this painting is rather huge at 16" X 20" with a painted image area of 12" X 16.5". So it's no wonder that Fleer cropped out part of the painting for the actual card.

Pencil, acrylics, and ink.