Q&A with Phillip Anderson

Which piece in your gallery is your favorite and why?

It might be the cover to Green Arrow Annual 1991. It is about 20 x 30 inches on board & fully painted by Mike Grell. It is a beautiful piece of Ollie as Robin Hood with Marian coming down the steps of a castle. If you know comic art you might like it & if you don't you still might like it. That being said, I would probably pick something different tomorrow. The cover to GL #19 2nd series is a favorite as well.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I'm in my 50's with a wife & two daughters. I used to sell comics & comic art for a living & dabbled in wine as a hobby. Now I sell wine for a living & dabble in comic art as a hobby.

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

I have been collecting art off & on for 35-40 years. One year my Dad bought a page from Nova for me. It didn't feature Nova, or really any characters I knew. It still triggered something in me. I loved the idea of having the only one in existence of something. Over the next few years, he bought me a Batman page from Detective by Ernie Chan,& a Neal Adams Wolverine sketch. The topper was when he got me a Frazetta pencil piece. After that I was mostly on my own in picking up new pieces.

How do you display/store your collection at home?

I have a half dozen pieces in my home office & then 10 or so hanging around the house. The rest are in binders or tubes. My wife isn't a comic fan, so the stuff around the house tends to be art that doesn't look like comic art, Jeff Jones, Mike Dringenberg, that sort of thing.

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

1) My next Green Lantern cover. I want to own 22 covers from the Silver Age series that ran from 1-224 (1988). 2) I would like a nice Will Eisner Spirit page. I have had a couple & let them go, thinking I would find something better. Dumb move on my part. 3) Iron Man #65 pages 12-13 (1993). I got Mike Grell to name a SHIELD character Agent Anderson for me. 4) A Mark Schultz Xenozoic cover. 5) A piece by John Singer Sargent. If you are going to dream, dream big! This will change by tomorrow.