The Liebowitz Family, owners of the famed Golden Apple Comics store in Los Angeles, has just announced the formation of the Golden Apple Comic & Art Foundation, a non-profit with the mission to help preserve, safeguard and showcase private collections of comics related art and books.
The 501-(c)(3) organization hopes to help ensure that priceless privately owned collections of historic and artistic benefit will be preserved for future generations. “We realized an immediate need to ensure that the comic book artform and collectibles will be around forever to inspire people from all over the world,” said Ryan Liebowitz, Foundation President, in a statement.
The GACAF has launched with a board that includes myself, filmmaker Kevin Smith, creator Marc Andreyko, retailer Mike Malve (Atomic Comics), and producer Gary Prebula, along with family members Ryan, Kendra & Sharon Liebowitz.
I’ll let the rest of the press release explain what’s going on, but in my own experience most people associated with comics are somewhere on the collectors/packrats/hoarders spectrum. Some of these collections are piles of paper (like mine) and some are priceless. And tons of valuable artwork is in the hands of private collectors who may have picked it up when its value was negligible. That is certainly not the case now. Getting private collections safeguarded for future generations is an important task, and one that I’m honored to help with, especially along with the Liebowitz family, who have had an immeasurable impact on the comics as an artform and business and on my own life. Bill Liebowitz, the late founder of Golden Apple, the “Comics shop to the stars” as it’s known, constantly took chances on a rookie kid who was more than rough around the edges, and helped me become the person I am today. I’m more than happy to pay it back as best I can and to continue his legacy through this foundation.
More:
“In addition to curating private collections, the Foundation has many other activities planned that include: Working with Universities and their Special Collection departments, domestic & international mobile museums, school lectures, fundraising auctions, comic industry scholarships, convention programming, original art preservation and events to raise awareness and funds.
The Foundation already has it’s first large donation and is working with the special collections division at the famed University of Pennsylvania to secure, catalog and house these prized possessions.
In addition, their first live fundraising event is coming on March 25, 2022: a charity film screening with legendary creator Frank Miller in Arizona. This will serve as the first ever US screening of the new documentary film Frank Miller: American Genius.
Tickets for the screening are already on sale. For more information or to purchase tickets, go here. And follow them on Instagram at @GAppleCAF
If I can make a suggestion, as someone concerned about preserving original comic art, so that we are not just left with scans of tired old comic book as the only record of this art form:
Many people piling into the collecting hobby have the attitude of collecting CGC comic books, it’s all about collecting “key” pages, and they don’t give a damn about the stories (or frankly the art). Surely the nadir of this is the ludicrous $3M paid for a Zeck Spiderman page. So for those that collect artists editions, we are increasingly left with just a jumble of random pages, all that could be found, because complete stories are getting broken up and the pages scattered to oblivion.
My suggestion is to start collecting scans of these pages from collectors, especially for complete stories while they are still intact. For collectors worried about “fresh to market”, perhaps there could be agreement not to make scans publicly available, unless in a museum exhibit or in an artists edition, and then only with their permission. We are talking high quality TIFF images, not the low-res JPEGs posted on Web sites. Scott Dunbier has been doing this for years, his inventory has been the driver for IDW’s artists editions, perhaps he would be willing to donate his inventory of scans to the Foundation.
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