Iconic ‘Death of Robin’ Original Batman Art Hits the Auction Block

Iconic artwork from DC's "A Death in the Family" Batman storyline is going up for sale during Heritage Auctions' June 16-19 Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction.

Not only will Mike Mignola's iconic cover art for 1988's Batman #438 be up for sale, but the entire 22-page story within the issue -- "A Death in the Family" Part 3 by Jim Starlin, Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo -- will head to auction. "For an important book like this, it’s extraordinarily rare that the entire story would be kept together and offered together," said Heritage Auctions Vice President Todd Hignite. "Because of the value of these pages, the vast majority would have been broken up a long time ago. But we’re very fortunate they remained together, so we can offer this complete story – one of the most important in Batman history – during what has shaped up to be the best Batman original art auction in recent memory."

Batman #438 includes the highly referenced image of the Dark Knight carrying a beaten and bruised Robin/Jason Todd after the character was severely attacked by the Joker with a crowbar. "[Robin's death] made me realize that all this goes a lot deeper in people’s consciousness than I thought,” Batman writer and editor Dennis O’Neil said in 1991. “All these years, I’ve considered myself to just be writing stories. I now know that that’s wrong. That Batman and Robin are part of our folklore. Even though only a tiny fraction of the population reads the comics, everybody knows about them the way everybody knows about Paul Bunyan, Abe Lincoln, etc. Batman and Robin are the postindustrial equivalent of folk figures. They are much deeper in our collective psyches than I had thought.”

Heritage Auctions' sale will also feature artwork work Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's 1988 Batman: The Killing Joke, variant Batman covers created by Jim Lee (Batman #619), Dave Cockrum and Neal Adams (Batman #246), George Pérez (Batman #438) and more. Also included in the upcoming sale is cover art for 1942's Detective Comics #59, drawn by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson. Additionally, the auction features a 1991 Todd McFarlane cover for Spider-Man #16, which guest-stars Rob Liefeld's X-Force, along with several individual pages from the same issue offered separately. "As such, these works show McFarlane at his peak in terms of action and detail," Hignite said.

For more information on the June 16-19 Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction, visit Heritage Auctions' website at HA.com.

Source: Heritage Auctions, HA.com.