Selling Collectibles Is Big Business. Heritage Auctions's Joe Maddalena Says It's Just Getting Started

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Heritage Auctions' $2 Billion Year Signals a New Center of Gravity for Collecting

A $9 million comic book. A $3.8 million“Star Wars” poster painting. A $13.5 million fantasy canvas by Frank Frazetta. Taken together, the numbers read less like outliers than a map of where high-end collecting is headed.

Heritage Auctions said it surpassed $2 billion in sales in 2025, the highest annual total in the company's history, as demand continued to intensify across popular-culture categories including sports memorabilia, comic books, entertainment artifacts, toys, and trading cards. Company leadership described the shift as structural rather than cyclical: money that once concentrated in certain corners of the fine-art market is increasingly flowing into collectibles, propelled by global participation and a collector base that appears to be expanding, not thinning.

One of the clearest signals, they argued, is the staying power of trading cards. What might have seemed like a speculative spike a few years ago now looks, in their view, like a durable market with deep emotional attachment.“For a while, you might think, 'Is this sustainable? Is Pokémon a real thing?'” a Heritage executive said.“But it is.”

That conviction is central to the firm's approach. Rather than treating categories as short-term trends, Heritage says it identifies areas with worldwide collecting interest and then commits resources over a multi-year horizon. The strategy is to“lean into” a category - such as trading cards - and accept that the payoff may take years to fully materialize.

The auction house also points to crossover collecting as a key driver. A buyer who begins with sports memorabilia may later pursue objects tied to childhood touchstones -“Star Wars” action figures, for instance - as nostalgia and disposable income converge. In the toy market, Heritage notes, the center of demand has migrated: while 1950s and 1960s toys were once the most avidly pursued, the strongest growth now appears in 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s material, reflecting a generation aging into peak collecting years and chasing high-grade rarities.

Recent record prices underscore how far these categories have moved from the margins. Heritage set a benchmark for comic books with a $9 million sale of a Superman comic, and achieved $3.8 million for Tom Jung's painting created for the poster of the 1977 film“Star Wars,” a record for an object associated with the franchise.

Looking ahead, the company sees additional runway in areas tied to Japanese popular culture, predicting that manga and anime will“explode” over the next five years as collectors pursue globally recognized intellectual properties beyond Pokémon.“One Piece” was cited as an early indicator of that momentum.

Heritage also highlighted the rapid ascent of American fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta (1928–2010), whose market has been pushed into new territory as collectors and institutions increasingly treat narrative illustration as adjacent to, rather than separate from, fine art. In September, the house sold Frazetta's 1966 painting“Man Ape” for $13.5 million, setting a record for fantasy art at auction.

The company attributes the surge to Frazetta's foundational role in shaping the visual language of modern fantasy. His reimagining of Robert E. Howard's“Conan” book covers, Heritage argues, helped revive interest in the stories and fed a broader cultural pipeline that eventually produced“Conan the Barbarian” (1982), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In that telling, Frazetta is not simply a cult figure but a defining artist of a genre -“the Leonardo da Vinci of that category,” as one executive put it.

If the past few years have blurred the boundary between“serious” collecting and fandom, Heritage's 2025 results suggest the line may be dissolving altogether. The question now is less whether these markets belong in the same conversation as fine art, and more how museums, scholarship, and future consignments will respond as narrative and popular-culture objects continue to command blue-chip prices.

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