See you in the funny pages

It’s weird how you make a note of certain news stories to tell people you know, based on their interests. The other day my brother in law told me a story about comic books, because I love comics, similarly stories about movies and zombies are usually brought to my attention.

The story comes from Sheffield, where an art gallery has been hosting an exhibition called Heroes. One of the pieces is a papier-mache statue entitled “Paperboy” by artist Andrew Vickers.

As you can see, Vickers used old comic books to make the statue, having found a stack of them in a skip. He salvaged them and used them to make his art, which is a pretty cool way of recycling, even if I’m still a little annoyed at the first person for dumping them in a skip. 

Vickers’ piece was on display when owner of local comic shop World of Superheroes, Steve Eyre was having a butcher’s. Suddenly, he recognized one of the comics being used. It was from the very first issue of the Avengers, from way back in 1963, when Earth’s Mightiest Heroes teamed up to fight Loki.

Now, being a collector who actually owns the very same issue, Eyre knew that it was a pretty valuable comic, at around £10,000. But it got better/worse when he kept looking at the comics used to see if he recognized around six more rare issues and estimated that the comics used would’ve had a value of around £20,000. 

Well ain’t that a kick in the head?

Eyre told Vickers, because, well you’d want to see somebody’s face when they realized they’d just used £20,000 worth of stuff for something they could have done with about a tenner’s worth of books from their local comic book shop. 

Vickers is quoted as saying:

To be honest I’m shocked but money has not got such a value to me. I think it is funny.

And maybe he has had a laugh about it, but I guarantee his first thought was probably “Oh, Andy you daft twat!”

Still, great publicity for the exhibit I suppose. And it is rather interesting that a work of art is actually worth less than the materials used to make it. 

Story here.

Any thoughts? You know what to do. BETEO.