But as the great works of Americanart, from AbEx to Minimalism and Pop, begin to show their signs of age, conservators are playing an ever more important role to collectors.
It was industry during the rise of industrial America and capital of kitsch when American culture doubled over on itself and turned pop quotation into art.
The book boasts reprints of complete stories and full-color covers and as a means of accentuating the significant cultural value (both pop and otherwise) they had as examples of modern Americanart and vehicles for deep, wonderfully insightful critiques of post-war American society.
Some art historians now prefer to view Pop as a subversion of American values, to read, say, Billy Al Bengston's chevron images as antimilitary or Roy Lichtenstein's cartoons of jet fighters as antiwar, when opposite interpretations are equally sensible, if not more so.