Savage Sword of Conan # 17 Pg. 39

This one is a very special piece to me on many levels. Back in my comic-collecting heyday of the 1980's I was buying back issues of a bunch of titles, one of my favorites was Savage Sword of Conan. SSOC was a magazine sized, and more adult version, of the standard Conan comic and it was printed in beautiful black and white.

I wound up buying SSOC # 17 before I obtained # 16, and when reading it I was totally blown away by the story "Worms of the Earth" which was a back-up featuring Bran Mak Morn, a lesser known Robert E. Howard character. This page was the recap of the previous issue's story, which I had not yet read. It was my first exposure to Tim Conrad's artwork and I was literally blown away. I eventually obtained SSOC # 16 and read the first part of "Worms of the Earth" which had pencils by Barry Windsor Smith and inks by Tim Conrad and it was spectacular!

Over years of comic art collecting, I was always trying to get a piece of Tim's artwork for my collection, the Barry Windsor Smith penciled pages that Tim inked were beyond my budget and I never was able to find a Tim Conrad penciled page that really sang to me.

Flash forward 30+ years and I visited local collector Paul Handler's place. He and I only live about 25 minutes apart in Southern Maryland, but we'd never previously gotten together. This page was framed up on Paul's wall and I was practically speechless as I never expected to run across a true grail from my youth! Paul is open to trading comic art, so he brought this to my place and we enjoyed an afternoon of comic art show and tell and art swapping which netted me some great pieces, including this beauty!

My very sincere gratitude to Paul Handler for agreeing to trade me this gem and not raking me over the coals during the deal! I'm not much of a poker player and Paul knew I REALLY wanted this one, he could have held out for substantially more, but instead agreed to a fair trade that each of us walked away from as happy collectors!