Hildebrandt, Tim and Greg

Several of the original paintings used in making the 1994 Marvel Masterpieces card set were offered at a 1994 Sotheby's auction at fairly high prices, but I don't believe that very many actually sold. A couple of years later one of my favorites, for the Venom chase card, turned up on eBay. It was owned by the Hidebrandt brothers' agent, Spider-Web Art Gallery. I believe that I bought it for $1,650, which I considered a bargain price. Since that was the 5,000th or some such sale for the gallery, they gave me a $50 discount on my next purchase fro them. Although most of the pieces they still had available wer not among my favorites, the painting for the Carnage chase card eventually turned up on eBay, and I was able to use my credit to buy that piece (for $900), which was not only one of the originals that I liked a lot but also an appropriate companion to the Venom that I already owned. I continued to check on eBay for other originals, but I found none other than paintings for what I considered to be for secondary characters from the large 1994 set of cards. I got lucky one final time when someone listed the original for the Deathlock card on eBay, which I bought for a mere $500. Not only was that painting considerably larger than the Venom and Carnage pieces, but it was one of the considerably more expensive piece that had been offered several years earlier at Sotheby's. Prices had risen and eventually more originals had been sold at Heritage, I didn't find any other pieces from the set which showed characters which appealed to me along with artwork that I liked. As things worked out, I am happy with the three pieces I obtained on eBay when prices were pretty much the lowest since the art was originally created.