John Romita Sr.'s original cover art for The Amazing Spider-Man #41 sold for $656,250.
That's the cover that introduced the Rhino in 1966. Inks by Mike Esposito. It now ties the ASM #84 cover, which sold this past February, as the most valuable Romita cover ever sold at auction.
It was the top art lot in a sale where the art half outran the books half. That's the story.
$12.15 Million in Art. $10.23 Million in Books.
Heritage's Comic & Comic Art Signature Auction ran May 8 through 10, 2026. Combined total: $22,385,980.
The original art portion alone realized $12,151,880. The published comics portion came in around $10.23 million.
The pages and covers outsold the graded books. In a single event, the one-of-one art beat the census-graded comics by nearly $2 million.
The Covers That Carried It
Romita ran the board. Beyond the $656,250 ASM #41 cover, his Amazing Spider-Man covers stacked up fast.
ASM #91 hit $325,000. ASM #72, the second cover appearance of the Shocker, brought $300,000. ASM #135, the second cover with the Punisher, sold for $137,500.
Joe Shuster's original cover art for Action Comics #24 landed at $450,000. That's a piece by one of the two men who created Superman.
Then Al Williamson's Star Wars. A group of 30 newspaper strips from 1981 through 1984 sold together for $465,130. The top single strip, the April 26, 1981 Darth Vader Sunday page, went for $75,000.
You didn't need six figures to play. A single Rob Liefeld Deadpool page sold for $55,000. One page. That's the accessible end of this market now.
Why Art Doesn't Behave Like a Graded Book
A CGC 9.0 has comps. There's a census. You can pull up what the last three copies sold for and bracket your bid.
An original cover has none of that. There's one. Romita drew the ASM #41 cover once, and Esposito inked it once, and that physical board is the only one that exists.
No grade to chase. No higher copy waiting in someone's vault to crush your price. No restoration discount debate, no "is the 9.4 actually a 9.6" argument. The object is the object.
That's a different kind of math than the books side. We covered the published-comics half of this same event separately, including the conserved Action Comics record. The books are climbing too. The art is just climbing faster.
Pages Outrunning Books
This isn't a one-auction blip. Romita covers tying their own records inside a few months tells you where the demand is.
The same logic runs through the original-art and art-card world Nerdworth operates in. A one-of-one piece has no substitute, so the ceiling isn't capped by the next copy. It's capped by the next bidder.
There are millions of graded comics. There is one cover per cover. Supply is fixed at one, and the ceiling has room because of it.
