First, as commond says, Rob won't see a dime from this. Who is bashing Leifeld. We know the price for this has nothing to do with the good or bad qualities of his art. Hey, I hope he made a few million from the new Deadpool movie.
We can legitimately criticize his art without saying he doesn't deserve the money it might generate.
At least Rob originally sold this art, as oppose to the money that people get from art stolen from Kirby or Ditko.

How much time has to pas before something is "historical" enough to have value? New Mutants 98 is 33 years old. Superman wasn't 33 years old when I was born but was already considered a historic, iconic figure and prices of material featuring his early appearances were already rising to what some people thought were obscene prices for something comic book related at that time. Usually something is considered old and historical if it was created before the person was born. There's a lot of people who were born after Deadpool's 1st appearance and are too young to have experienced it. The colors their perception of value. We're old. 1991 and Deadpool seem recent to us and still new, but it's no more new or recent than Superman or Batman were when most of us were born. And a lot older than anything Marvel except the Timely stuff was when we were born.

Perceptions of value change. The art market (as a whole, not just comic art) was considered undervalued for a long time and there was a huge market correction earlier this century, and the comic art market followed suit shortly thereafter. The pendulum may have swung too far in the opposite direction, and there may be another market correction on the horizon, but art prices (comic or otherwise) are never going to go back to what they were before the first market correction.

SOP is often to price something to see what the limits of the market are. I think this is the case with the Deadpool cover. Will the market bear that price for it? I doubt it, but we'll have to see. Is it an obscene price to pay? I think so, but that's a matter of opinion and perspective. I think paying $150 K for a handbag with the Louis Vuitton label on it is obscene as well, but people do it all the time if they have the money, and a lot more of those bags exist and are produced than a piece of original art. It's not my place to judge how other people spend their money (and it skirts on politics to discuss things like wealth divide, taxation etc. so we'll avoid that); I wouldn't spend it, but if someone else does, well that's out of my control. Could a lot of people be fed for that $7.5 million, sure, but you could feed a few families with basics for a week with the money you spent on that omnibus edition, Taschen edition or artist's edition, or new big screen TV or new smartphone or whatever, but you choose to buy those anyways because you can. I am not going to judge you, and I won't judge someone if they choose to buy this piece of art instead of using the money differently. The scale may be different, the principle is the same.


-M

Do you own the original art for the covers of those issues?

All right, all right, I give up.

I'll put New Mutants #98 in a Mylar bag. One never knows.

The cover in question. Notice there are no feet.

dyn1.heritagestatic.com/lf?set=path[3/0/7/5/5/30755732]&call=url[file:product.chain]

That's not the cover. I'm not sure what that is.

This is the cover:

 

I just looked at what was selling at Heritage in the next big auction. Sloppy research on my part.