Qart CEO Eli Weisman Wants Fans To Start Building Their Marvel Comics Fine Art Collection Today

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.

ComicBook.com: What were some of the pieces that were hardest for you to let go? Eli Weisman: There were some really cool Captain America ones. That's my favorite character. But there's also some badass Spider-Man ones. Really, there's so many cool ones. Some of the characters I, personally, don't even recognize because I'm not really a big fan of them, so it's not that big of a deal for me, but then there's all the recognizable ones: Wolverine, the Hulk, the Avengers and all those other characters like that. There are some pretty cool images in there. Some of them are from the comic books themselves, some of there were used in different illustrations, so it also depends on which version of the character it is. Some I might like more than others. Some of them might look a little bit cartoonish, for example, and I don't necessarily like that. There's one in particular with Captain America running with his shield, and we can see the bullets flying at him and it's just cool. I love that piece. ComicBook.com: What are some of the pieces that you most think fans should go check out right now while they're still available on Qart? Eli Weisman: Well, there are 399 results when you go to Marvel Artworks [on the Qart website]. There are many pieces that we don't have live at this time because we're maybe getting them framed or we might be in the middle of processing them. Every single piece has to be photographed, described and made ready to sell in inventory. So we have approximately 2000 different Marvel items. There's a huge, huge variety and we're constantly going to be adding to that because of the pieces we're still processing. We couldn't' possibly process it fast enough because we have inventories coming in left and right and there is just so much volume. ComicBook.com: Besides Marvel pieces signed by Stan Lee, what other special pieces do you have available? And what's coming up in the near future for Qart? Eli Weisman: In most cases, our Stan Lee signed art is just Stan Lee signing another artist's work, but there are three or four other artists where the pieces will be double signed by the artist and Stan Lee. We don't really do much with DC, but we have other things like, for example, with Chuck Jones we have a bunch of limited edition signed cells from different titles. We have a very good collection of Marvel comic book production drawings which we haven't even processed yet for sale. We have thousands of drawings that were used in the creation of various cartoons, and we haven't figured out exactly how we're going to market that yet. One exciting thing we have coming up is, we've worked very closely with Stan Lee and we're working on a charity auction function for our site. That's one of our pet projects and he's agreed to help us with it and we're working to do a launch event with the Stan Lee Foundation for Education, and he basically dedicated some pieces for that event. We had them framed up and we're basically just waiting to build the technology a little further, but we're going to do an event to raise money for charity with those pieces. ComicBook.com Is there anything else fans should know when they visit the Qart website? Eli Weisman: No, not really. Once you get on there and look around, it's pretty straightforward. The pricing is great and, obviously, if the customers have any questions they can email us. We're very responsive. ComicBook.com: The product speaks for itself? Eli Weisman: Yeah, exactly! Look at the image, if you like it, it's going to look good when you get it. That's the thing also is, when you're buying these things online you can't appreciate what you're looking at. You can't see the richness of the colors and how the printing was done or how it's going to pop on your wall.  I can say, out of every single piece – and we've sold hundreds so far – we've never had one single person complain once they got it. In fact, on the opposite, they've been surprised about the quality because, looking at an image online, you have no idea what it's going to look like. When you get it, we're very careful about our quality and they look awesome. They're just really enjoyable to have. Fans can find out more and check out the gallery for themselves at Qart.com.