COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Conan the Barbarian 8 Universal
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Grade:
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9.8
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Certification #:
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0051852006
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Owner:
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Rune
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
This book contains the first Conan story that to my knowledge was published in Denmark, so this book has special value to me.
Furthermore the book contains a humorous remark by Windsor-Smith, when drawing a large number of coins he wrote "I must be mad to sit here drawing all these coins" (page 14). Since the back of this book is quite boring, I took the liberty to upload a photo of the drawing with this remark, marked with a red rectangle. Actually the photo was taken from an original and unread Conan the Barbarian #8 book from 1971. As you can see the message was hard to read due to the cheap paper and blurry printing, so only few ever noticed the message - therefore the message is often referred to as a "secret panel message". This classic remark makes Conan #8 quite special - and at 9.8 in pure white pages it currently does not get any better!
I have uploaded high res photos of the front and back of the book here (paste the URL into your browser to see the images):
FRONT
http://www.hardwaretidende.dk/hard/artikelimages/0051852006F.JPG
BACK
http://www.hardwaretidende.dk/hard/artikelimages/0051852006B.JPG
This book is a good example of Roy Thomas' and Barry Windsor-Smith's approach to the genre. Barry Windsor-Smith wrote in his book Opus 2:
"Although they were not unknown to us, Roy Thomas and I tried to avoid the excesses and clichés of the sword and sorcery/adventure genre. We mostly avoided monsters; instead I'd draw actual animals on a grand scale, like a giant dog or a reptile".
And this book excactly introduces a giant reptile illustrating the more restricted fantasy approach (one dare not write "realistic approach", so I will not do that :-) which I believe was indeed a wise choice (the giant bat in #6, the large snake in #7, the Bull God in #10 and the giant spider in #13 are other examples of this approach).
Currently (July 2017) there are 27 unrestored CGC 9.8 books of Conan the Barbarian #8. I know of these 23 books:
1010192009, WP, Rocky Mountain pedigree
1013922007, WP, Rocky Mountain pedigree
1027525009, WP, Suscha News pedigree
1027530007, WP, Suscha News pedigree
1027530008, WP, Suscha News pedigree
1051554017, WP, Suscha News pedigree
1051554016, OW-W, Suscha News pedigree
1051554018, OW-W, Suscha News pedigree
1041670005, WP
0051819005, WP
0051852006, WP
0066060013, WP
1474499015, WP
0014017002, OW-W
1009698008, OW-W
0919987002, 0W-W
0986029009, OW-W
1074148003, OW-W
1200035013, OW-W
1221416004, OW-W
0006450015, O-W
0032581007, O-W
1203769004, OW-W, Qualified
(WP = White Pages, OW-W = Off-White to White Pages and O-W = Off-White.)
I have photos/scans of 22 books, only 0006450015 O-W has (near-)perfect cover centering and orientation. Of the books with WP, 0051819005 clearly had the most perfectly centered cover (quite rare, since most Conan #8 books seem to have off-centered covers). You can see the 22 books here:
http://s1270.photobucket.com/user/runesr2/library/Issue08
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