Well, this past weekend was the annual Emerald City Comicon in scenic Seattle WA. A horde of screaming mounted Hyrkanians couldn't have kept me away from there! I stalked in when the doors opened on Sunday morning armed with a wad of cash and my list of comics that I wanted. The first thing that shocked me was that the entire convention center was packed with 25 and 50 cent boxes and I swear to Crom that I rooted through every single bloody one of them.
I was also keeping my eye out for any of the McFarlaine Conan action figures or maybe a Conan Mego, but to no avail. Oh well, I still came home with a pretty good haul.
The first thing I saw as I walked in was not quite a Conan item, but closely related. The booth of a sculpture company boasted a huge banner announcing their release of this awesome Kull of Atlantis statue. Here's the banner and the statue...
It was a little pricey, so I didn't buy it. Another piece they had was this Conan bust designed after a famouse Frazetta painting that I almost peed my pants over. Too bad it wasn't for sale, the sign said it was "coming soon"...
Moving through the stacks of comics, piles of action figures and overweight guys with questionable personal hygene, I discovered this booth that had a wicked display of "home-made" trading cards all done by this artist named Rak. Just "Rack", kind of like "Madonna" or "Sting". There were hundreds of different cards, all with different superheroes on them, so of course, me being a single-minded fanatic, I start digging through the box for a Conan card and lo and behold, there it was! So I bought it. Hell, it was only a buck!
Not sure what happened to Conan's pupils, but who am I to supress somebody's creativity?
Then it came time for some serious comic book rooting. As I said before, the comics were insanely cheap (except for maybe the Amazing Fantasy 15 that was going for $100,000). So after digging like a mole through a pile of dirt, I came away with a ton of great comics. Check out the stack of Conan stuff...
Such notable issues that I'd like to point out are:
Conan the Adventurer 1
Conan the Barbarian 100 (in which Conan's main squeeze, Belit, kicks the bucket)...
The Marvel Guide to the Conan Universe (I had been looking for this one for years!)...
Conan 250...
Conan 163 (featuring one of my favorite covers of all time by Ernie Chan)...
The Conan the Destroyer movie adaptation (that doesn't help the terrible stinkiness of the movie one bit. But hey, it was a dollar!)...
And one of the weirdest Marvel Team-up's I have ever seen...
I also grabbed a bunch of non-Conan yet Robert E. Howard related titles like Kull and Red Sonja...
...including the first issue of the Solomon Kane mini-series (also a Howard creation)...
But the find of the day was when I stumbled across, after no less than SIX YEARS of searching, a 100% complete copy of the board game, HeroQuest! I'm not kidding, I've been searching game shops, thrift stores and garage sales for six friggin years for a copy of this. I've seen it on ebay for upwards to $120, and just couldn't bring myself to buy it. But there it was, in some guy's booth, in all its glory for $50! I threw down the cash faster than a horse race junkie needing a new kidney.
For those of you not familiar with the game, it's a dungeon crawl type board game from Milton Bradley that came out back in 1990. I had it back then and my friends and I played it until it fell apart. I of course always played the barbarian. And check out the guy on the box cover, now who does he remind me of?
That's all for today. Thanks for reading and I'll be back soon with more high adventure!
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