Way back when I was a wee lad, just starting to get notions about wanting to one day draw for a living, I went to a small local con. There I met Ho Che Anderson and he was selling a stack of his original art at his table, including this here piece of fully painted art. This was the intended cover for the then-forthcoming-sadly-never-released Grendel Tales series from Comico, run instead as the back cover to the final issue of their Grendel series, issue 40.

These may have been some of the first original comic art pages I'd seen in person, and this certainly was the first painted art I'd seen. I remember going through the stack, pulling aside the last pen & ink page, and being utterly dazzled. Color. Texture. Splatter. Paint! I just stood there staring at it, sweating and doing rapid math in my head. How many months of allowance would it take to meet his (especially in hindsight) extremely reasonable price? (No, I'm not going to tell you how much, just to say it would have been an easy buy for anyone with any kind of a job, but just too big a pill to swallow for a kid). In the end, I just couldn't make it work. I put it down again and walked away.

Actually what I did was go home and paint the back of a jean jacket in a very similar fashion. Iconic Grendel mask with red splatter. I wore that thing well into high school, and I'd occasionally think back on this moment with regret. I'd had an original Grendel cover painting in my hands, and it could have been mine for only REDACTED! What had I let slip through my fingers?

Fast forward 30-something years, and Ho and I have become acquainted, crossing paths a few times professionally. One day, I bust out this story, I thought he might find it funny, or touching, or I dunno.

I dodged a bullet, he says. The oil paint eventually made the comic board stiffen up and crack into pieces. It's long gone.

Ah well.

And then one day he just shows up with it... Found during a studio clean out. And just like that, a 30+ year old error has been corrected, and it's where it had always been meant to be. Thanks again Ho, you are a most excellent dude.