wizardseye311

Nothing on Google or their website. Try sending an email to them.

News Stand Cover for your viewing pleasure:

Because it's the direct market ed. The news stand covers have the CC and UPC symbols with the #7 inside the price box. Both covers were cut across the horses face though.

Here's my copy of Vol. 3 #7. Notice how all the flaws have been corrected. The white on her fingers and tip of her hair, the line under the "O" and color around the "A" in Red Sonja have been fixed.

No, these are test print runs. Maybe 100 to 1,000 copies to make sure everything is lined up. Notice the red, yellow, blue, black, and circles with the cross hairs around the edge? Those all have to line up, and then there's still some adjustment issues seen with the red pencil circles. So the final adjustments are made, and the print run starts. Occasionally through the run the pressman will pull a couple sheets for inspection. If anything isn't lined up, more adjustments are made. As with most mass produced items, flaws are inevitable. Even more so on the interior pages. The flawed copies should be discarded, but some will slip through depending on the laziness of the pressman. Some of my Marvel Feature reader copies are so slurred I can barely read them, .

It's not the OA for this issue. It's what's known as a color separation test. Notice the red pencil marks and circles? Those are the flaws that need to be addressed. Wiki explains the process: "The process of color separation starts by separating the original artwork into red, green, and blue components (for example by a digital scanner). Before digital imaging was developed, the traditional method of doing this was to photograph the image three times, using a filter for each color. However this is achieved, the desired result is three grayscale images, which represent the red, green, and blue (RGB) components of the original image: The next step is to invert each of these separations. When a negative image of the red component is produced, the resulting image represents the cyan component of the image. Likewise, negatives are produced of the green and blue components to produce magenta and yellow separations, respectively. This is done because cyan, magenta, and yellow are subtractive primaries which each represent two of the three additive primaries (RGB) after one additive primary has been subtracted from white light. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are the three basic colors used for color reproduction. When these three colors are variously used in printing, the result should be a reasonable reproduction of the original, but in practice this is not the case. Due to limitations in the inks, the darker colors are dirty and muddied. To resolve this, a black separation is also created, which improves the shadow and contrast of the image. Numerous techniques exist to derive this black separation from the original image; these include grey component replacement, under color removal, and under color addition. This printing technique is referred to as CMYK (the "K" stands for Key, a traditional word for the black printing plate). Today's digital printing methods do not have the restriction of a single color space that traditional CMYK processes do. Many presses can print from files that were ripped with images using either RGB or CMYK modes. The color reproduction abilities of a particular color space can vary; the process of obtaining accurate colors within a color model is called color matching."

So I was thinking (dangerous, I know), what if many of the 5/78 copies were damaged? Retailers complain, and Marvel offers to replace them. Give them a couple months to send them back, and place their orders for new ones, a couple months to process the orders, and another couple months to get them printed and sent out. There's your six month difference between the two issues. We're talking 1978 snail mail here so it would've easily taken that long. If you look at the Star Wars comics from around the same time it actually has "reprint" in the Marvel box for the second print copies. I'm not talking about the Whitman's with the diamond price box, but the square price box w/UPC code. If Marvel considered Red Sonja #9 from 11/78 a reprint wouldn't they have placed the "reprint" in the Marvel box? I think what we have here are replacement copies. Something to chew on anyway.

Yeah, good luck with that. There's only five of each, and I may be the only one to have both. I've had a few of both copies raw, and the 11/78 copies are always brighter.

For comparison

Didn't see what it ended at, but a 9.8 Savage Sword #1 just went for $353.00. That doesn't bode well. What, Marvel not respond to a fan question? You don't say. Like I said, I asked Stan Lee himself, and got no answer. IMO, the reason for the two #9's was the print quality of the 5/78. The 11/78 colors are much more vibrant, and I can usually tell which is which just by looking at the cover, but who knows, the real reason could be anything.

Nice copy! As for the original art, you may have to wait a couple of minutes for that to be available.

It will be nice when they post some pics. I've been wanting a #13 Frank Cho Silver Foil for a while, but I don't collect slabbed Dynamite books. You have to keep in mind that there are quite a few 9.9's and 10.0's for these books. Most of my raw copies are flawless. Especially my #8 RRP. I paid $4.00 for it, and cannot find a single flaw on it. Paid a little more for some of the other RRP, foil, virgin, and sketch covers, but not much though. With most modern books it should not be too hard to find pristine raw copies. There's just no shortage of them. So in my mind there's just no point in paying for a graded copy. Of course if you order them directly from Dynamite they're always going to look like someone played Frisbee with it before you got it. I'm exaggerating of course, but not by much. BTW, there's a 9.8 Marvel #5 Red Sonja on eBay right now with 11 hrs. left, and it's at $5.50. What does that say?

Scroll down. It's there.

Sooner or later someone will cough one up. It's just a matter of time.

That's the one. Yowza!

This one that was on Comiclink recent focused auction. http://www.comiclink.com/Auctions/item.asp?back=%2FComicTrack%2Fauctions%2Fbids%2Easp&id=950985 I had a 9.4 raw but sold it at the recent Edmonton Pop Culture comic convention. I love this book, the Red Sonja portrayed inside is my favorite: she is a flirty "swashbuckler" Cool. I just read "Shadow of the Vulture" by R. E. Howard from the pulp magazine, The Magic Carpet, Vol 4, No. 1 (January 1934) the other day. The very first Red Sonya of Rogatino story from which the character, Red Sonja was based. There's 23 or so pages of it here: http://books.google.com/books?id=8L6o2spJsNUC&pg=PA39&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

No, it's still there. Some insufficiently_thoughtful_person tried to spam the thread, and that's what got deleted. Check out the last post. There's a great photo of Angelique Trouvere dressed as Red Sonja.

Nice! Post a scan.

Awesome!

I saw your post, and was going to ask if you had any Red Sonja slabs, but I figured no one has any I need at this point. Yeah, the #13's are really bad. Almost every raw copy I've seen is like this. Some graded ones too.

Actually, the art on some of the regular covers was much better, but the RRP's are rare, and people are willing to still pay more for them. Especially the earliest ones. Dynamite Red Sonja is a great read though, and the interior art is really amazing.