An extraordinary work executed in 1982, when the artist was just 22 years old, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Versus Medici will star in the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York on 12 May, where it will be offered with an estimate of $35–50 million.

Billionaire real estate developer and philanthropist Jorge M Pérez has erected gleaming towers in cities throughout the world, and his name is attached to the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the flagship contemporary art museum in his adopted hometown. But at the moment, his pride and joy is a squat two-storey warehouse building called El Espacio 23, in a little-known industrial area of the city.

An experimental arts center inaugurated in December, it is the culmination of a great American success story – one which began overseas.

The complex origin story of DC Comics, Inc., one of the oldest and most prominent comic book publishers in the U.S., begins in 1934. That year, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson founded the company as National Allied Publications; in February of 1935 its first comic, entitled New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine #1, hit the stands. The company’s second title, New Comics #1, was published in December of that year, appearing in a size close to what would become industry standard during the period now called the Golden Age of Comic Books.