Bold black felt-tip pen signature on a 3x5-inch white card, acquired in-person by a longtime and much-trusted autograph hound. In very good condition and ideal for matting with a favorite photograph. It's no surprise that director Tim Burton spent his formative years glued to the tube, watching old cartoons and horror flicks, which would help form the deliciously ghoulish and artfully warped sensibility of his later work. After abandoning an animation career at Disney Studios, where he found himself "incapable of drawing cute little foxes" and drew ire from higher-ups for spending time and resources on personal projects like the shorts "Frankenweenie" and "Vincent" (a tribute to his idol Vincent Price), he teemed up with actor Paul Reubens to create the deranged comedy Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985). The Looney Tunes-inspired live-action flick proved one of Warner Brothers' biggest hits of the 1980s and the rest was history: Burton was given big budgets and a free hand to create visually mesmerizing films like Beetlejuice (1988), a comic twist on all the "Shock Theatre" pictures that had kept him up late as a child; the darkly lavish, gothic Batman (1989); Edward Scissorhands (1990), a tongue-in-cheek tale of an artificial boy put together by a benign scientist; the cult holiday classic The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993); the critically acclaimed biopic Ed Wood (1994); and the sequel Batman Forever (1995). After 1995, Burton kept plugging on, but became something of a caricature of himself, cranking out always beautiful to look at, but less original features like James and the Giant Peach (1996); Mars Attacks! (1996); Sleepy Hollow (1999); the remake Planet of the Apes (2001); Big Fish (2003); Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005); Corpse Bride (2005); Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007); Alice in Wonderland (2010); and Dark Shadows (2012).

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