Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom #1, pg 9

How hard is it to find a genuinely happy page in Locke & Key? Pretty difficult. How hard is it to find an interior OA page from Locke & Key? Nigh impossible. But yet, here is the OA for a happy page from Locke & Key!

Sent out from IDW as part of a retailer incentive give-away in 2010, this page was sitting at a comic shop in Saskatchewan, Canada. Pages from this issue are the only interior pages that Gabe has ever released from his family's personal collection...that's it....one issue out of the whole Locke & Key run.

Who would have thought that this fun little adventure for Bode in Keys to the Kingdom #1 would have the emotional gut-punch years later in the last issue of the L&K run? Not me, but Joe Hill sure did. Wow. When I see this page, I see the multi-year journey I took inside of Locke & Key, hanging on every issue to the very end. Not a lot of pages can trigger that kind of reaction (see my Death of Shane page from Walking Dead), which makes this one all the more special, regardless of the true rarity of interior pages.