The most expensive piece of comic-book art ever? Perhaps. Bleeding Cool says:

Tired of everything being "iconic"? Me too. Anyway, a description of the page from the auction house:

It is a nice piece of work, but you have to be amused by the fact that it led off a chapter on page 556. Anyway, the auction house expected it to get at least $100,000. Final bid?

$448,125.

Previously, this was the recordholder for a splashpage: page #8 from Spider-Man #50, which sold for $88,500. It's like a middle-aged dork-identifier: I remember both the Spider-Man page and the Dark Knight page, right down to wondering exactly what Batman was swinging from. To say nothing of Robin, who was just hanging in space. Couldn't have seen the original Spider-Man page, though - it came out in 1967, and I wasn't reading comics yet. Which meant I read a reprint. You may say: so? Stop rambling. But there's a point to all this:

One: in the olden times, back in the distant reaches of places like Fargo, there weren't any comic book stores where you could get back issues from years past, and you couldn't download a .cbr because such things did not exist. When a comic was gone, it was gone until it showed up in a yard sale, or in the stacks down at Dirty Ernie's second-hand paperback store.

Two: while this was annoying and frustrating to those of us who wanted the future to arrive NOW please, thank you, at least it was part of a world that made lines on paper, not lines on screens. Will anyone pay a half a million for the monitor someone used to create the next comic masterpiece?

Anyway, it's a great illo, and I wish I had a loose half-mil, if only to say "I'm glad I have my half-million dollars instead of that piece of art, all things considered." There are other splash pages in the book some like better; Batman on horseback in the Napoleon pose would be my favorite. Are we done dorking out? Okay.