COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Conan the Barbarian 5 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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0975863007
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Owner:
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Rune
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
This pristine CGC 9.8 NM/MT is the highest graded example ever certified by CGC. Also the centering on this book is close to perfection. I consider this book to be one of my most beautiful CGC 9.8 books, it must be extremely close to 9.84999999! :-)
The original owner described the book in these terms: "The book is extremely well centered and does not contain any writing or date-stamps on the covers. It has an extremely clean bright white back cover with awesome cover gloss all around. The front cover image displays a very bright & crisp color strike. The CGC casing is undamaged and in a new-style housing. It was recently graded by CGC [...] This particular copy originated from a one-owner collection."
Furthermore the secret of this book is that this is not Conan the Barbarian #5, but this is actually the true Conan the Barbarian #3! In 2010 Roy Thomas made the following explanation:
"For issue #5 I made up a tale that used a Robert E. Howard name from a poem—Zukala-for a wizard—villain. It was a fair—to—middling story, and Barry drew it well, even if tigers weren’t his strong point and though Zukala wound up looking a bit like a refugee from a Steve Ditko Dr. Strange. I did have Barry redraw some things near the end of the story. He had a winged, flying demon suddenly become "tired"—at least that was the explanation he gave me—and fall to his death when pushed out a lower window. Possible, perhaps, but not satisfying. Also, we decided that Zukala‘s changeling daughter shouldn't die at the end. As it turned out, though. "Zukala‘s Daughter became Conan #5, not #3 [...] I realized it worked better from a chronological point of view to make 'Grim Grey God" #3, then to utilize "Tower of the Elephant," and to save "Zukala's Daughter" for #5. So that's what I did, and the publishing order of Conan #3 and #5 was thus reversed. And it shows, with the latter being a bit cruder than #3 and #4, more in line with what Barry had drawn in #2."
Excerpt from "The Barry Windsor-Smith Conan Archives Volume 1" 2010 (the foreword by Roy Thomas).
Current status of 12 Conan the Barbarian #5 CGC 9.8 books out of 13 books (July 2017):
1051555021, WP, Suscha News pedigree.
0065013003, WP.
0975863007, WP.
1039654006, WP.
1108987003, WP.
1171309012, WP.
1172748003, WP.
1197554003, WP.
1477486005. WP.
0096990019, OW-W.
0165589016, OW-W.
0990134001, OW-W.
(WP = White Pages and OW-W = Off-White to White Pages.)
Of the 11 books I have seen, 1108987003 had the most perfect cover centering and cover orientation, although 1051555021 was close to win in this category. You can see the 11 books here:
http://s1270.photobucket.com/user/runesr2/library/Issue05
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