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Q&A with Matt Kennedy
| Q: | Which piece in your gallery is your favorite and why? |
| A: | I've got a Jerry Robinson prelim page that features a Joker-esque prototype in the context of the death of Dick Grayson's origin. This page is from the 1930s and I've been working for years to accumulate enough provenance to prove that Jerry Robinson was undeniably the co-creator of the Joker. I've been going through the process of hi-res scanning everything and haven't quite gotten to this yet —mostly because of the size of it, so it's not currently in my gallery. Among those, I am very partial to the Fables Halloween cover quality piece that I commissioned Mark Buckingham to create. I had him dress Snow White and the Wolfpack as The Endless —with the formless progeny in Wesley Dodd's golden age Sandman costume, and Bigby dressed as Constantine. |
| Q: | Please tell us a little about yourself. |
| A: | I ran the La Luz de Jesus Gallery for a decade and wrote the book Pop Sequentialism: Great Comic Book Art of the Modern Age, which was the published catalog of the landmark exhibition in 2011. That later evolved into the Pod Sequentialism podcast on the Meltdown Network, which aired over 100 episodes. I'm one of those kids who read comics and grew up to do what I love. That's included acting, producing, writing, and curating. |
| Q: | How long have you been collecting comic art and what prompted you to start? |
| A: | Comics were always around. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and so that era is particularly special to me. An episode of Simon & Simon rekindled my interest and I realized there were a couple of comic book specialty shops in my area. Once I stepped inside, and this was not a very high-end shop, I was hooked. |
| Q: | How do you display/store your collection at home? |
| A: | In addition to running a fine art gallery, I run an art collective and I have an important, museum-worthy collection of contemporary art, ranging from YBA artists like Marc Quinn to southeastern naive artists like Purvis Young, and there are Robert Williams, Murakami, and Banksy pieces in between, so due to space restrictions, there is a very limited amount of sequential art actually hanging on my walls. I do however have a room dedicated to Anime, Manga, Comics and comics-influenced pop art and production art and in addition to framed art, I've got architectural drawers and art binders all over my home and office which I frequently open and enjoy. |
| Q: | What are your top five most wanted original pages or commissions? |
| A: | I don't want to say what my top five or Holy Grail pieces are because putting that out there assures that the guy who has it will mark it up for resale or decide that because someone else mentioned it that they no longer want to sell it. One-itis is almost always an exercise in masochism, and to be honest there are a few dozen pages that most collectors would all have on their top 100. The usual suspects include Wrightson Frankenstein pages and Horror covers, Dave Stevens Bettie art, Watchmen pages, Neal Adams Green Lantern and Green Arrow pages, Marshall Rogers Batman pages, Byrne's Phoenix Saga in X-Men, Perez Teen Titans in Judas Contract, Bissette and Totleben Swampy pages, Gary Leach Marvelman, select Moebius and Manara pages, almost anything Osamu Tezuka, etc. Let's just say that there are specific pages that I would love to have and that would absolutely get hung on a wall, but I'm not a billionaire. I was never really a commission guy when it comes to sequential art until recently. I've bought sketches to support charities and paid people to draw me things, but they're not as financially sound as a published page. Many artists just simply do not put the same level of completion into a commission that they will into a published work-for-hire. I don't know why that is. It might be the psychology of not getting paid unless it's good enough for print, or knowing that a published page bears their name and reputation, or thinking of convention sketches as easy money, but with superhero comics I've yet to see a commission live up to a published page. Conversely, the artists who draw actually comedic work routinely crank out gems as commissions and even as free sketches. They still lack provenance, though, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't factor into it for me. Part of what makes owning an original published page such an honor and privilege is knowing that the entire circulation number of fans saw it in print. That offers a pride in ownership that is relatively egalitarian. There are pages for sale in the early 90s for less than a hundred dollars that are worth over a hundred thousand dollars today. No other investment yields such dividends. Not stocks, not bonds, not crypto-currency, not anything else. Even at the top of the blue chip art market there has never been a ten-thousand percent increase in value in a matter of two or three decades. And none of those other tangible goods offer the narrative connection that comics do. Owning an original art page from a comic that you read and cherished is not a replicable experience in other fields of investment. Even other types of nostalgia like baseball cards or stamps, which one could connect to a memory, lack the uniqueness of original art. If you own the cover art to Action Comics #1, you are the only guy. Nobody else can claim that. It's the Mona Lisa, man. But as an experienced curator and art director I've come to enjoy the assignment and collaboration elements of commissions. The |
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Comic Art Fans may be compensated if you make a
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