By Crom! (Or should that be "buy" Crom?) Frank Frazetta's original cover painting for the Lancer paperback edition of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Conqueror sold this week to a private collector for a reported $1 million, according to Spectrum Fantastic Art. That's four times the previous record price for a Frazetta painting, which was $251,000, paid for the cover to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Escape on Venus in 2008.

Up until the sale, the painting had been on display at the Frazetta Museum in East Stroudsburg, as Frazetta had retained all of his covers for the Conan books except for one that had been stolen from the publisher's office when it went bankrupt.

Frazetta was asked recently whether he had ever read the books before painting his cover, and replied, "I didn¹t read any of it. It was too opposite of what I do. I told them that. So, I drew him my way. It was really rugged. And it caught on. I didn't care about what people thought. People who bought the books never complained about it."