Il Ponte's ComicArt Department and the Bilal Benchmark
A €42,000 plate from Paris sets the reference; Italian originals are still waiting for one of their own
Plate 24 from The Carnival of Immortals is not a sketch. Executed in India ink, gouache, and coloured inks on a 40 by 30 centimetre sheet, it is a finished work from the first episode of Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy, published by Dargaud in 1980. When it sold at Millon Paris, it cleared €42,000. That number is now in the record.
The problem for anyone who collects or holds Italian comic originals is that no equivalent record exists. Not because the work of Manara, Crepax, or Liberatore lacks the cultural weight or the scarcity to generate comparable numbers, but because the trades have not happened at auction. They have happened in studios, in back rooms, between dealers who do not publish results. Informal markets do not build comparables. Without comparables, there is no price discovery. Without price discovery, there is no exit.
The Structural Change
In October 2025, Il Ponte Auctions launched a dedicated ComicArt department in partnership with Millon Group. The scope covers original plates, illustrations, animation cels, and rare editions, with an explicit focus on Italian heritage artists alongside the broader European bande dessinee field.
The significance is not the category itself, which serious collectors have understood for some time. The significance is the mechanism. A recurring, institutional auction channel creates something the informal market never could: a transparent, dateable, publicly accessible price record. Each sale adds a data point. Data points, accumulated over several seasons, become comparables. Comparables make it possible to price a holding, to defend that price to a counterparty, and ultimately to exit on terms that reflect the work's actual market position rather than whatever a dealer is willing to offer on a given afternoon.
The Bilal plate is useful here precisely because it sits at the intersection of the two worlds the new department is designed to bridge. It is a European bande dessinee original, sold through Millon, at a price that reflects both the artist's canonical status and the maturity of the French auction market for this category. Italian equivalents, carrying comparable artistic weight and in some cases a thinner supply of documented originals, have not been tested against that kind of institutional demand. The new department creates the conditions under which they might be.
What the Record Also Shows
None of this changes the fundamental character of the asset class. Liquidity is low. It was low before October 2025, and the new channel improves exit options without transforming them. A collector entering this market should expect a medium holding horizon, limited ability to move a position quickly, and results that will vary considerably by artist, period, and condition. The Millon-Il Ponte partnership builds infrastructure; it does not build a liquid secondary market overnight.
What it does build is a place where price discovery can happen in public. For a category that has lacked exactly that, it is the necessary first condition for everything else.
The Bilal plate has its number in the record. Italian originals are still waiting for theirs.
If you want to know more, contact us at info@italiainvested.com.
