“How Much Do You Want for the Kaluta?”

I’ve been so busy preparing for, reporting on, and recovering from Comic-Con that I’ve had no time to share my thoughts about it here, so why not let a picture stand in for those thousand words?

One afternoon, as I was racing from one end of the humongous exhibit hall to the other, I spotted a dealer selling the original art for the cover to an issue of Doorway to Nightmare I’d written long, long ago. (Make that long, long, long ago.) So I stopped my power walking and asked, “How much do you want for the Kaluta?”

The dealer’s answer? “Thirty.”

You do realize I was meant to add three zeroes after that number, right? There was of course no way I could afford to own the drawing, but I figured I should at least get a picture with it.

And so:

Here’s the cover as it was originally published.

Time flies. Money flies, too.