[KING CONAN COVER]

Dark Horse’s ambitious reprint program for the Marvel Comics’ books based on the works of Robert E. Howard has been one of my favorite things about living in the Golden Age of Reprints. The Chronicles of Conan (19 volumes to date) have proven that nobody wrote a better Conan comic than Roy Thomas. The last five volumes of the Chronicles series have not featured any Thomas scripts, and they’ve been purchased because I’m a completist and for the John Buscema art, and certainly not for any reading pleasure. I’m gonna be brutally honest: J.M. DeMatteis’ stories are terrible, and Bruce Jones and Michael Fleischer have no understanding of what makes Conan an epic character, nor do they have any grasp of the Hyborean world. I actually gritted my teeth buying volume 19, and two months later I still haven’t finished reading the eight stories (about 200 pages) within. By comparison, I read those 500 page Savage Sword of Conan reprints in one sitting, or eight beers.

This week’s release of The Chronicles of King Volume 1 didn’t even last two beers, and I couldn’t be happier. Roy Thomas script + John Buscema/Ernie Chan art = Conan brilliance. REH only wrote one story in which Conan was a king, and it does not appear in this book. That frees Roy from re-telling a story the hardcore fans already know and love, and allows him and Big John to flex their own creative muscles. OK, this early in the run (issues 1 through 5), Roy was adapting pastiche novels written by L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg, who each have their problems as storytellers but are all essentially conversant in the pulp format (strangely, the solicitation for this volume on Dark Horse’s website claims “King Conan is based on a series of five short stories by Robert E. Howard, originally published in Weird Tales,” despite the credits obviously proving otherwise.) They were all students of REH, which means no Cimmerian Olympics or medieval English towns doubling as Cimmeria, a la Bruce Jones.

Instead we get a 50-something Conan, father of three and faithful husband, crossing half the world with his oldest son, Conn, to slay the evil wizard Thoth-Amon. Not having a King Conan comic available for the past 20 years, I had forgotten how enjoyable the father/son dynamic was between Conan and Conn. Conn’s eagerness to impress his father (and his hero), his stubbornness and his naiveté (both of which echo that of the younger Conan we all know and love from the first two years of the book) are balanced by Conan’s grim experience, his lovable hard-headedness and his unabashed pride in his son. The image of a bloodied Conan armed only with a cudgel walking into Hyperboria to save Conn is not something REH wrote, but it’s something he could have written. The same goes for the ending of that particular story, in which Conan loudly corrects his vassal, Prospero, that the Hyperboreans were not just fighting him, they were “fighting me and my son, Prospero. AND MY SON!” There’s the defiant, battle-mad barbarian and proud father I know and love.

[THEY SHARE A NAME AND A BARBER]

All of this has me very excited for the impending creative switch on Dark Horse’s Conan title. Roy Thomas is slated to take over scripting the book, which will jump forward in Conan’s career; Hopefully, we get a Conan book that’s not re-doing REH’s stories, but features Roy writing new tales in the style of REH. I’ve enjoyed Timothy Truman’s work on the title, but I don’t want to see another version of “Queen of the Black Coast,” not by anybody. In fact, if it was up to me, I’d have Thomas writing and Truman doing the art for this new Conan; Truman, more than anyone since Big John Buscema, has captured the primal essence of everyone’s favorite Cimmerian. His art on Conan: Songs of the Dead is my favorite “modern” depiction of the character, and I’d love to see Truman take over the monthly art chores. Especially with Roy Thomas scripting.

[THIS IS BEING AIRBRUSHED ON MY VAN EVEN AS YOU READ THIS]

-Paul

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