One of the best things about comic books is the art. For decades, talented artists have been pouring their talents out onto a page to tell beautifully rendered stories. For 75 years, Marvel Comics has been home to some of the greatest artists in the medium. Now, the online art marketplace Qart wants fans to visit their site and begin building their own collection of these great works of art. Eli Weisman, the CEO of Qart, took some time to talk to us about the website.ComicBook.com: Explain to me what Qart is. What does it do?Eli Weisman: Basically, Qart is an online art marketplace. We do all kinds of different original paintings and limited edition sculptures, glass items and sometimes we do, also, licensed products. For example, Marvel comic book stuff, Disney, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and different things like that. Some Warner Bros., Chuck Jones, various things like that. We’ve worked very closely with Stan Lee on multiple projects so far. We have an extensive inventory of limited edition signed pieces, mostly Marvel artwork, and a wide variety of many different characters.ComicBook.com: How did Qart become involved with Stan Lee?Eli Weisman: We met him through a company called Marvel Fine Artworks. It was a company that had the license for Marvel fine art previously. There’s another company that has it now, and, also, since then Disney bought them out, but they arranged an introduction and since then we’ve had him over by our place multiple times to do signings. He’s quite a character and a very enjoyable person to work with. Sometimes we have him here for quite a long time, so he starts coming up with different poetry and he’s just a very funny guy. He’s 90-years-old now and sharp as a tack. Still running around all the world constantly. He’s never sitting still and you can never pin him down anywhere.ComicBook.com: Qart is encouraging fans to build their own Marvel art collection. Why is that something you consider to be worth doing?Eli Weisman: Obviously, with all the releases and all the movies that have been coming out, there’s a lot of buzz about the Marvel characters. Growing up, we are, of course, familiar with all the characters. We had the comics. My brother, who is my partner here at Qart, is very much into it. He knows the backgrounds and the stories and everything you could imagine. I’m a big fan of some of the characters, and some of the images that we have, we really like them a lot. In fact, it’s painful sometimes to even sell them because we know we can’t really replace them. So, some pieces might be a certain size piece only in an edition of four pieces and it’s very hard to let go of that fourth piece. But we definitely thought that it was appropriate for the market and that the opportunity was there to do the deal right. The timing is right. It was pretty much a no-brainer.Now, there are other places where you can buy Stan Lee signed limited edition pieces, and obviously some fans go to the shows a lot of the time for those signing, but the price points that we offer on pieces is substantially lower than what anybody else can sell them for, and that’s because we do a very large deal. We carry hundreds of different titles and we basically have purchased out the entire editions of everything we carry. So, whatever we have, we’re the only source for it. We have the entire editions.Aside from that, we have two different purchasing formats. We have the gallery, where you can go and take a look at everything that we carry and prices that are already discounted, they’re already much cheaper than where you would find it at anywhere else. We also have auctions that we do, where we’ll throw a piece up and sometimes start it at a $1 starting bid and let the customers themselves determine what they want to pay. It goes back and forth. People bid against it and, whenever the auction ends, that’s what it sells for. So that’s our loss-leader/promotional auction, but a lot of people enjoy that and find it exciting.
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