Last July in Los Angeles, a stoneware vessel depicting Popeye the Sailor Man, made in 1987 by artists Magdalena and Michael Frimkess, sold at a Bonhams auction for $65,895. Everyone was shocked, especially the auctioneer. “That was several times the estimated range,” says Jason Stein, Bonhams’s director of Modern Decorative Art and Design. “In the early ’90s, when I got my start, it would have sold in the low thousands or even upper hundreds.”