Heritage Auctions just made another extraordinary sale, fetching $13.5M for Frank Frazetta's "Man Ape" (1966), the highest auction price ever realized for a Comic or Fantasy work of art.

In the art market, we're accustomed to the duopoly of Sotheby's and Christie's dominating the field, but it's Heritage where we've recently seen a procession of extraordinary prices at the high end of the non-art market, with records routinely set for collectibles such as sports and entertainment memorabilia.

At one level, this sale of a highly sought-after piece of illustration fits neatly within into the paradigm of recent market surges for personal property with popular cultural meanings, and outside the market for traditionally recognized high art — precisely at a moment when the mainstream art market has shown signs of softening. But this sale also opens onto larger ontological questions about what distinguishes a work of illustration from a piece of fine art.

It's the Frazetta's familiarity from mass reproduction that propelled its price not only to an artist record but to an all-genre record. However, this sale also immediately recalls the sale of Ernie Barnes's "Sugar Shack" (1976) at Christie's for $15.3M in 2022, following a bidding war that catapulted its price 70x above its high estimate and leagues above the price realized for any other work by the artist. Demand for that painting followed from its mass reproduction as an illustration for Marvin Gaye's album "I Want You."

Complicating the picture is the fact that Frazetta takes visual cues from nineteenth-century European academic painting, whereas Barnes draws on the visual language of cartoons — and yet the current marketing and institutional contexts have established the Barnes as a work of fine art and the Frazetta as a comic illustration.