As I've mentioned here a few times, there are a lot of phony sketches being sold these days in the original art market. I see dozens of them at any given time on eBay, often from sellers who have sold many fakes but still seem to have 100% positive comments about their many past sales. As noted, the greatest volume seem to be forgeries of Charles Schulz and Jack Kirby…and I probably should have mentioned Robert Crumb and Bill Watterson.
The fakers usually stick to deceased artists or to guys like Crumb and Watterson who maintain low profiles and don't seem likely to rise up and denounce the impersonations. A few impostors do get bold though and cobble up bogus sketches by folks who are around and visible. Neal Adams, I'm told, has gone after the sellers of Neal Adams sketches that he didn't do. Good for him.
How can you tell phony drawings from real ones? There's no easy way but here are some things to keep in mind…
- Forgers almost never forge published covers or pages. They forge the kind of sketch that a cartoonist might do of one of his characters as a gift to some fan. If someone did go to the trouble to forge, say, a whole, published page from a Kirby issue of Fantastic Four, that would be a lot of work, what with all the drawing and lettering, and they'd have to fake the company's rubber stamps and editorial notes and such. And also you could put that piece of art against the printed book and see the differences. This kind of thing is done but not very often.
- When artists do the kind of "fan" sketch we're talking about, they almost always sign them to someone. They write in the name of the recipient. A forger doesn't do that because he knows you'll be less likely to pay top dollar for a sketch signed "To my good friend Gustavo" if by some chance, your name is not Gustavo. So if you see an alleged Schulz drawing of Snoopy and it isn't signed to anyone, be very suspicious.
- Also, Schulz seems to have signed most of his fan-type sketches with his full, cursive signature of "Charles M. Schulz," not with the easier-to-forge "Schulz" with which he signed the newspaper strips. And I'd be really suspicious of the Schulz sketches signed — and this occurs more often than you'd imagine — "Schultz."
- That the drawing seems to be on old, aged drawing paper is not an indicator of authenticity. Old blank paper is not that hard to come by. Recently when I cleaned out my friend Carolyn's apartment, I found over 500 sheets of old blank drawing paper of a brand no longer made on which Walt Kelly never got around to drawing Pogo strips.
- Forgers usually trace existing sketches. Last time I looked, there was a fake Captain America drawing up for eBay auction that was just a tracing of a real drawing Kirby did…and a bit of Google searching would show you the original one. If you compared the two, the forgery becomes pretty obvious. And what if the facsimile is real close? Well, that should not make you think the one you can purchase is authentic and that Jack obviously did the same exact sketch twice. He didn't do that.
- A forger will sometimes copy a published drawing — say, a Captain America pose that Kirby drew for the cover of some published comic. Then the claim will be that this was a preliminary sketch that Jack did for the comic, thereby accounting for the similarity. Kirby almost never did preliminary sketches and he certainly never did one in ink.
- Most eBay sellers who sell fake drawings seem to have a lot of them and they all appear to be the work of the same forger. They have one or two fake Kirbys, a fake Dr. Seuss, a fake Walt Disney, a fake Schulz or three, a phony Watterson, a bogus Joe Kubert, etc. If someone has a lot of sketches by dead guys and none of them are signed "to" anyone, there's about a 90% chance all of them are frauds.
- And lastly, use your head. If a never-published original Superman drawing by Joe Shuster has a minimum opening bid of twenty dollars, the ink is probably still wet on it.
Please don't write to me to ask if a particular sketch is real. I long ago made a policy of not doing that because it makes some people real mad to hear that they paid good money for a Wally Wood sketch done four years after Wally died. And though once in a while I make an exception for a "Jack Kirby" drawing that looks like Jack must have held the pencil in his teeth when he did it, I don't authenticate artwork unless I can hold it in my hands and inspect it in person…and I often don't do it at all.
But be suspicious. Be really suspicious.