Elia Powers
Michael Leigh said he will adore Superman and Batman forever.
"I used to be a huge comic collector as a kid," said Leigh, a
Costa Mesa resident. "After I bought enough, I'd sell copies out of
my red wagon, so I could afford a new bike."
He's still selling. Just to a different clientele.
Leigh, who values his comic book art collection at about $50,000,
has put original posters, paintings and laminated pages on display at
Dante's Inferno Art Gallery in Costa Mesa.
The walls of the second floor studio are covered with super-sized
superheroes who flex their muscles in front of blood-red backgrounds.
Mint-condition comic books are shelved inside glass cases and stacked
in boxes, giving the exhibition the look of a niche garage sale.
Which is fitting, seeing as the garage is where a majority of the
memorabilia rested before this showcase.
"My wife wouldn't let me put everything up in our house," Leigh
said. "I could only choose a few of my favorites."
By the looks of his eclectic collection, it would seem Leigh has
been amassing comic art his entire life, but that's not the case. He
gave up collecting at the age of 7 and didn't become interested again
until adulthood, when he purchased "Death of Superman" and thousands
of dollars worth of other comic paraphernalia.
"I looked at it as an investment," said Lee, now a
speech-and-debate coach and professor at Orange Coast College. "I was
fascinated with the characters and the story lines."
The majority of Leigh's collection is from the late 1980s and
early 1990s, which he considers the golden years of artistry. Major
comic companies such as DC and Marvel began focusing on
sociologically relevant topics such as alcoholism and infidelity, he
said.
That attracted high quality artists, who painted comic pages on
tabloid-sized paper, using watercolor or oil to illustrate the
superheroes, Leigh said. The paintings were then shrunk down to
actual comic size.
Flipping through glossy pages from comic books of that era, Leigh
noted the attention to detail and artistic ingenuity he said is often
lost in the era of computer-generated images.
He pointed out his most prized possessions -- paintings by artist
Gil Bruvel and a series of Japanese comics -- and noted that many of
the old comic books are now movies, such as Frank Miller's "Sin City"
and Stan Lee's "Spider-Man."
He referred to his habit of comic collecting as "gluttonous" and
admitted to traveling each year to San Diego for serious browsing
time at a major comic convention.
