Q&A with Ben Friedman

Which piece in your gallery is your favorite and why?

Very tough question, but I will go with the J.C. Coll Masterpiece. Why? Because I have looked at it 1000 times, and I still find it mesmerizing. The movement, the line work, the lighting. It’s hard to imagine a better pen and ink piece.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I worked in the federal government for most of my career (at DOJ and NOAA), and now work in academia. I started collecting comics as a kid, got serious about it as an adult, and for years had a side hustle buying and selling comic book collections to fuel my own comic book obsession. I was a very early user of eBay (1998), before most dealers understood it. I was also a very early user of CGC. I would buy books at conventions, slab them, and then sell them on eBay at large profits. Eventually other dealers caught on, and I ended up selling off my own significant comic collection to start buying art. No way I could have built the collection I have without all this very hard (but lucrative) work. Oh, and I’m a real nice dude.

How long have you been collecting comic art and what prompted you to start?

I started collecting comic book art in the mid-90s. Initially I just bought random pieces that I thought looked good on the wall. I started seriously collecting comic book art in the early 2000s. Me and CAF member “Michael One Minute Later” did a lot of early collecting together. About twenty years ago I started focusing on strip and illustration art and never looked back (but, man, I had some great comic book art back in the day!).

How do you display/store your collection at home?

I have tons of stuff up on the walls - as much as my wife will allow. Since I collect a lot of golden-age illustration art, it looks good all over the house. I have particular out-of-the-way places to hang the strip art, which looks great in simple black frames all put together. The collection is now too big to hang, so a lot of stuff is in archival boxes and binders. But I look at it as often as I can - otherwise what’s the point?

What are your top five most wanted original pages or commissions?

The Grail List: (1) a JC Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post Cover; (2) a really great early Prince Valiant Sunday; (3) A Segar Popeye Sunday (one of the best strips ever); (4) One of those awesome King Gasoline Alley Sundays; and (5) a nice large Norman Rockwell pencil prelim.