Mike Mignola Hellboy 3rd Wish Issue 1 Page 17

i remember going to Wondercon 2006 with ONE goal in mind. One. i was going to buy a mignola page.
there were other highlights to the trip and a lot of other great sketches and artwork was obtained but i pretty much went by myself. i was dating a woman that lived in san francisco at the time so there was that too.
but while she was at work i went to the con. i thought every day opened at the same time. oops. i remember getting there and the line to get in was pretty short. all good. hours later i realized it didn't open until way later than i expected. smart phones weren't a thing yet so i just sat there and chatted with my fellow nerds that got there early. once the doors opened i RAN to artist alley to find mike.
not only did he have a TON of pages available, but i had budgeted enough. next to him were the wonderful Terry and Robyn Moore. we'd met a few times and i've mentioned elsewhere being friends with thier son. they sat there and actually helped me pick which page to buy. we narrowed it down to this one and a page from Dracula that was half as much. but at the end of the day, this one had an octopus. a freaking octopus! so it won.
one of the things i remember from this is a lot of the pages had empty word balloons. it was the start of digital lettering i guess, but the word balloons were still being drawn in.
no idea what this would cost today but its one of the ones my wife knows if i'm ever in prison and she needs money quickly to run to this one first.
i was able to get one more mignola after this. just a sketch. but hopefully its not my last