I've written before of Heritage Comics' wondrous auctions, and their upcoming one is another doozy. I've been browsing mostly through the original comic strip art; if this stuff made up the collection of a cartoon museum, it would be a formidable institution. There are several E.C. Segar Popeye dailys, so many terrific Chester Gould Dick Tracys that I lost track, an array of Caniff strips, some wonderful early Blondie strips, McManus and Bushmiller, McCay and Herriman, Schulz (still nifty even if it's the most overvalued original art there is), a Hans and Fritz painting by Rudolph Dirks, and…well, if I went on, this would be a very long blog posting. A separate catalog focuses on items from Wendy and Richard Pini's collection–and those offerings are impressive in themselves.

You can subscribe to Heritage's handsome, glossy catalogs for $100 a year–which is a better deal than it sounds, since it comes with a $100 coupon you can apply against a purchase. (Tip: If you buy something from Heritage, which I have, you may find yourself getting the catalogs for free, at least for awhile.) The catalogs are nice, but most of the images are small; simply trolling around the Web site is at least as enjoyable, since the online images are oversized, letting you admire the penwork and other aspects of the original art. And even if perursing the site isn't as much as owning all these gems, it's about as good as window shopping gets.