This article is part of the Artnet Intelligence Report: Year Ahead 2026. Drawing on in-depth analysis of the past year’s market performance, the latest edition offers a data-driven snapshot of the art world today—from recent auction results to the artists shaping the global conversation.
Heritage posted more than $2 billion in sales in 2025, the highest total in its history. Was there a category or sale that surprised you?
I don’t know if it’s a surprise anymore. The popular-culture space—whether it’s sports, or comic books, or entertainment, or trading cards—the interest is just growing and growing worldwide. Collecting interest has changed. Money that used to chase a section of the art market is now chasing these collectibles, and it’s consistent. For a while, you might think, “Is this sustainable? Is Pokémon a real thing?” But it is. You can see that the people who are buying these collectibles love them. These collectors are here to stay. The momentum is increasing, not decreasing, which is pretty incredible.
Heritage’s auctions span so many categories. What is its blanket strategy for, or approach to, the collectibles market?
The men and women who are the partners and shareholders of Heritage, we all have the genetic disorder of being collectors—and we love it. In terms of collectors, I think that you’re seeing crossover. You’re seeing somebody who starts out in sports and then remembers, “Oh, when I was a kid, I loved Star Wars action figures,
and I want some of those.” That’s what you’re seeing now when you look at the toy market: It’s exploded for high-grade rarities. Toys from the ’50s and ’60s used to be super collectible, but now it’s the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s toys that are really collected, because the age group is moving up.
For us, we identify a category that has worldwide collecting interest. If we believe in a category, we put a lot of effort into it and lean into the category, like trading cards. If we’re selling Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon, we believe in the category. But it’s four years later that you’ll see the results. It’s just us focusing as a company,
looking at these markets, deciding what is a viable market over the next five years, and putting the horsepower into it to make it run.
Pokémon Raichu 14 Unlimited Base Set. Prerelease PSA trading card. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.
Last year also saw the house set a number of auction records, including the most ever paid for a comic book—$9 million for a Superman comic—and the most ever paid for an object associated with Star Wars—$3.8 million for Tom Jung’s painting for the poster for the 1977 film. These are not niche categories anymore. Do you see other growth opportunities in the collectibles space?
I still think there’s lots of new people coming into this space and they’re building collections. And in terms of building that collection, they’ve just started. But the market has not matured anywhere in terms of how far it has to go. It’s got a long way to go.
These categories are going to grow, such as those in Japanese culture. I think the fields of manga and anime, over the next five years, you’ll probably see those exploding because of worldwide collecting interest in some of the biggest IPs [intellectual properties] in the world, other than Pokémon. You see it with One Piece, but you’re going to see it with a lot of other properties that are known too.
Heritage has helped stoke the market for Frank Frazetta, who’s known as the “Godfather of Fantasy Art.” Last September, it sold his 1966 painting Man Ape for $13.5 million, the most ever paid for a piece of fantasy art at auction. What is causing the spike in his prices?
I think Frazetta is the artist of that generation who’s crossing into the fine-art field. Frazetta reimagined the covers of Robert E. Howard’s Conan series and brought all these people to read the books again, which birthed Conan the Barbarian (1982), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. This whole genesis of how we saw these characters—he brought them to life. He’s like the Leonardo da Vinci of that category, and people are starting to recognize his importance to the entire genre of fantasy.
When the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens [in Los Angeles later this year], he’s going to get even more interest, because people are going to get to see these things in the context of narrative storytelling. That’ll also increase interest in his market.
Tom Jung, Star Wars: Episode IV–A New Hope poster artwork (1977). Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.
Is there an effort to differentiate Heritage from the major auction houses, like Sotheby’s and Christie’s?
Well, if you look at them, they’re selling fine art and decorative arts and billion-dollar paintings at auction. But our painting market is illustration art, we dominate American illustration art. We have completely different business models. And that’s all it is.
Last year, our thing was emergence, us coming onto the scene and being acknowledged as the third-largest auction company because we did more than Bonhams and Phillips combined. It’s like there’s the traditional, established, old-school auction house, and we’re a disrupter, the new kids on the block, although we’re 50 years old.
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