COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Conan the Barbarian 3 Universal
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Grade:
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9.6
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Certification #:
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1041668002
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Owner:
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Rune
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
An extremely beautiful book with simply perfect cover centering, perfect cover orientation (very rare for a Conan the Barbarian #3 book), perfectly centered staples and pure white pages. I have photos of 9 of the current (August 2013) 11 Conan the Barbarian #3 9.8 books, and not one of these books has perfect centering, perfect orientation and pure white pages. Also this is the most perfect Conan the Barbarian #3 9.6 book I have ever seen (and I have seen quite a few 9.6 books). Thus depending on your preferences, this book may be very hard to top. Furthermore, as seen in the photos, this book has less visible damage than many of my 9.8 books, very sharp corners, no visible spine stress, and I have no idea why this book was not graded higher (I do realize that many owners of 9.6 books whine about not getting a higher grade, but I do believe such thoughts indeed are warrented for this book, but do check the photos and see, if you agree! :-).
Rumor has it that Conan the Barbarian #3 books should be very rare or be in "supposed low distribution", but there is little evidence to support that idea in the CGC census. For example Conan the Barbarian issues 6, 11, 12 and 18 are at least just as rare, so Conan the Barbarian #3 books do not seem to be in a more limited supply or more scarce than several other Conan the Barbarian books.
Furthermore this is not really Conan the Barbarian #3, but actually #5 (corresponding to how Barry Smith and Roy Thomas chronologically made these stories). In 2010 Roy Thomas wrote the following explanation:
"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).
So enthusiasts wanting to collect Barry's first three Conan stories need to collect issues 1, 2 and 5 instead of 1, 2 and 3.
The unique feature of this book is that it contains the first published adapted Conan story from Robert Ervin Howard*, and had Marvel not acquired these rights, my guess is that Conan the Barbarian would never had reached similar popularity. As Roy Thomas explained in the extra material on the 2011 Conan Blu-Ray movie, when Marvel Conan comic books were selling at their best, Marvel Conan earnings were twice as high as Marvel's earnings on The Amazing Spider-man and The Fantastic Four combined.
*See my description regarding Conan the Barbarian #4 for further details, when Marvel acquired the rights to use Robert Ervin Howard's original Conan stories.
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