Which Conan comics?

August 6, 2011 2:42 PM

Where to start and where to go in reading Conan comics?

With the new movie coming out and thinking back to having enjoyed some of Kurt Busiek's work on Conan back in the early-mid 00's (I'm kind of a Busiek fanboy), I thought I might take a dive into some of the Conan comics. Given just how many there are, I was wondering where to start and which ones were worth reading. Or were the ones by Busiek an exception to the rule and I should content myself with the memories and perhaps try to find those issues again?

posted by Hactar to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

I can't recommend any specific issues/volumes without pawing through the books, but even so: I thoroughly recommend grabbing a volume or two of Savage Sword of Conan to start with. The individual comics are are wildly variable in quality — some are fantastic and some are junk, and the stories are all over the place, not serial — but you get so many (B&W) pages of Conan action for the dollar that it's indisputably a good deal, and the paper and printing feel true to the pulpy spirit of the originals. I don't like the reading experience of the digitally re-colored, glossied-up Chronicles of Conan reissues nearly as well, even though some of the Conan the Barbarian comics collected there are very good ones.
posted by RogerB at 3:09 PM on August 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

I'm going to echo RogerB's comments above. The Savage Sword reprints are a good deal and have a number of gems. Don't start with the regular Marvel Comics run of Roy Thomas unless you like incredibly repetitive story telling. I think that Roy Thomas's insistence that there always be a "sorcery" element in all stories that are "sword and sorcery" makes the stories suffer.
posted by josher71 at 6:14 PM on August 6, 2011

In one case, The Jewels Of Gwahlur, the art (by P. Craig Russell) is so lovely that in my opinion it's worth forking out for the larger-sized, colour version.
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:20 AM on August 7, 2011

Response by poster: I'm going to pick up some Savage Sword volumes next time I hit a comics store. Thanks everyone!
posted by Hactar at 11:16 PM on August 7, 2011