In the last few months, eBay has been flooded with fake sketches for sale. I've seen at least a half-dozen bogus Jack Kirby sketches offered — i.e., sketches that were in no way drawn by Jack — and we will soon reach the stage where there have been more bad counterfeit Charles Schulz drawings than there were actual Peanuts strips. There are a couple of sellers who specialize in nothing real and others who intermingle phonies with real ones. Some of these fraudulent drawings have been sold for the kind of prices that ensures their makers will not stop cranking them out.
Beware, beware, beware. Even some art dealers who've been around for a while and look as if like they should know better have been fooled.
There is relatively little fakery of published drawings. Almost no one whips up a phony page from a printed issue of Fantastic Four or Batman because…well, that's a lot of work, the real one might well be floating around, and it's too easy to compare the page being offered for sale with the version in the comic book. It doesn't take as much effort to copy/trace a drawing that a great artist did for some admirer, especially a drawing that if it was published at all was published in some obscure publication.
It's especially easy when the artist in question is deceased, though live artists have been spoofed as well. Not long ago, a collector paid megabucks for a phony sketch — so much so that he stubbornly refuses to believe he got taken. No one — including the artist who allegedly did the drawing — can convince him otherwise.
Phony drawings should not be confused with re-creations. There are a lot of those around too and when done with any integrity, they are clearly signed as such. Mike Royer, who inked much of Jack Kirby's work in the seventies, has done re-creations of many pages and covers and he signs and dates them in a way that leaves no doubt that the piece in question was never touched by Jack. Other artists do this too, including artists who are replicating pieces that they never worked on in the first place. This is all Kosher. Passing a newly-created pencil drawing off as if was by Frank Frazetta is not.
How can you, the art buyer, protect yourself? There's no easy way and some fakes are really, really good. Frankly, I would never buy an "unpublished" sketch by mail, nor will I "authenticate" a piece I haven't seen in person. And I'm supposed to be an expert at this regarding certain artists. That should tell you something.
Another version of this post will appear on this blog in a few months, followed by another and another and another…