Actually, the only thing I don't understand why 
people bother to collect it in the first place, 
is wedding cake. They keep them in small silver 
boxes, but still -- yuck! 

As for the whole pop culture thing, there is a 
market for kitch, possibly more than for high 
culture art, because what motivates the 
collectors is a passion for the object 
themselves. If you learn anything from reading 
postings on this forum, people have definite 
passions for cels.   

As for the whole throwaway art/ pop culture 
thing, there is a market for such things, even 
for things fifty years in the past. 
It's like those covers for Weird Tales, or all of 
those other science short story magazines. The 
artists saw them as things they did to pay the 
rent, and the art itself as a throwaway. Most of 
the time they painted over the canvus, so that 
they could create other covers. Now they're worth 
money because of their rarity and because people 
like them. Sigh, to have a painting of a Martian 
fighting an astronaunt hanging on my wall. :) 

Samething with comic page art. In the past 
companies would destroy them, or give them out to 
readers -- just the cover and some splash pages, 
unfortunately. It was throwaway art, but they can 
fetch into the thousands of dollars. 
The holy grail for Marvel art is the cover to the 
Fantastic Four no.1. No one knows if it even 
exits anymore. If you have any information to 
it's whereabouts . . . . :)  

Really what will determine a cel's value in the 
future is whether or not the series manages to 
survive. That's something that's difficult to 
determine. I've read reviews of books which were 
at the time declared to be timeless classics, but 
the novels are now long out of print. Time is a 
heart breaking process.  

Animation will of course survive. This leaves 
questions about when everything is transfered 
over to computers, if cels themselves might hold 
a mystique for people in the future who're 
reduced to collecting pencil sketches. 

Hmm, in the end, anything can happen. Time's 
funny and things change. It's sensible to only 
collect things that you like, and in a price 
range you can afford, with the knowledge that you 
might be forced to accept losses. 
Markets only really break when people collect not 
to keep, but to sell (basically when people buy 
something in the hopes that it will increase in 
price in times); and if there are no new 
collectors entering the market. 

As for holy grails -- maybe a good black and 
white Might Atom cel. It's a classic, and more 
importantly, this was during a period when they 
were tossed. I've only seen one, but they didn't 
post a price. Might be wrong, but it's a 
thought. :)