Valiant Market - X-O Manowar #1 page 27

A new post in my series on recent interesting Valiant sales (you can find the first in the series here, the second here and the third here). These posts are meant to track original art sales of pages that are in high demand and appear very rarely such as pages from UNITY or Deathmate Prologue, splash pages etc. Today, we have something a little different. No doubt that page 27 of X-O Manowar #1 by Barry Windsor-Smith is sought after. But we've seen pages from this (over-sized, meaning more pages available) book before, and Barry Windsor-Smith Valiant art is available quite readily from his dealer. X-O Manowar pages are very easy to obtain and while this page is absolutely beautiful it is not particularly exciting. So why am I featuring this page. I'll give you 1,525 reasons but first check out the page:

Yup, this page just sold for $1,525 on ebay. That is by far the highest price I have ever seen for an interior page of Valiant Barry Windsor-Smith art. Higher than his splash pages have sold for. More than double this Deathmate page he did with Jim Lee. Almost double this UNITY page, which is more exciting, from a more important book and is one of just 16.

So what happened? I think it's pretty clear that Valiant Comics return to publishing in 2012 is having a big effect on the market. It doesn't hurt that Valiant recently debuted the new look of X-O Manowar:

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the lack of yellowing, the action and the fact that the page is signed all would have helped the price. Nevertheless $1,525 is well above the market.