Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 09: Essential Conan

Essential Conan
Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor Smith, Gil Kane and friends
Reprints: Conan #1-25 (October 1970 – April 1973)
Get this for: Barry Windsor Smith — five stars

Despite the fact the Conan series ran for decades there has been only one volume of Essential Conan, for the simple reason Marvel foolish dropped the license to print Conan stories a while back and Dark Horse took it over. Though long out of print, that sole volume is worth searching out as it contains the complete run of Barry Windsor Smith Conan stories. It was through these stories that he forged his reputation as perhaps the greatest fantasy artist to work in American comics.

And the writing, in the capable hands of Roy Thomas, isn’t bad either. He managed to capture the essence of Robert E. Howard’s character, if toned down a bit for mainstream comics. At the same time he established a rough continuity for Conan that mixed the original published stories, with those published after Howard’s death, various unfinished fragments and his own original tales. He did this btter than L. Sprague deCamp did for the prose Conan, in my opinion, especially in these earliest stories with Barry Smith.

It must have been quite a big risk, back in 1970, to acquire the rights to a fairly obscure character created by a writer who died more than thirty years earlier. Sure, there had been reprints and continuations of Conan since, but except amongst fantasy fans, Conan was hardly a household name. To than have a relatively unknown artist like Barry smith on it, then largely known for a few fillins on the likes of X-Men and still somewhat of a Neal Adams clone was a double gamble. But it worked out well for Marvel: Conan was one of the first, if not the first comics series to succeed through fan appeal. It was also one of the first series not to have Stan Lee writing the first few issues, a clear sign of the old order changing.

Now Marvel had kept on publishing non-superhero titles all through the sixties while Lee and Kirby and Ditko and Heck revolutionised superhero comics, but Conan was the first high profile new Marvel title not to feature the long underwear crowd. You can see Roy Thomas struggle with this a bit in the first few issues, getting away from the Lee style of plotting. There are a couple of traditional expositionary dialogues in the first two issues that could just as well have been put in a Spider-Man story for example. As Thomas grows more confident he finds his own voice — at the same time Barry Windsor Smith gets more say in the stories as well. His art is dropdead gorgeous from the start, even in black and white and fits Roy Thomas’ writing perfectly and as Thomas gains confidence in him you can see that they become more than the sum of their parts.

It’s that combination of Smith and Thomas that makes these stories standout. There would be other great artists on Conan, with John Buscema providing the definitive Conan, but the series was never quite as creative and sparkling as it was in the first twentyfour issues.