In our February blog post about Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian #15, we covered how that issue’s final story page — a full-page splash panel of Conan bidding the wizard Zukala farewell, signed by its artist, Barry Windsor-Smith — also served as the artist’s farewell to the series’ readers, as #15 was the last issue he would draw of the title.
Or, at least, it was supposed to be. Read More
In April, 1972, the third issue of Marvel Comics’ Kull the Conqueror arrived on stands — a full eleven months after the release of issue #2.
Of course, as folks who’ve been regular readers of this blog for a while already know, while Kull, the comic book, had been absent for almost a year, the same could not be said of Kull, the character. Marvel’s associate editor Roy Thomas, who in 1971 had launched this second series based on a Robert E. Howard fantasy hero in the wake of Conan the Barbarian‘s success (as relatively modest as that was, so far) was evidently determined to keep Conan’s literary forbear in the public eye — perhaps in hopes of eventually resuscitating the cancelled Kull title, or maybe just because he liked the hero and his milieu and/or was enjoying his collaboration (as the series’ writer) with sister-and-brother art team Marie and John Severin, who’d both come aboard Kull with issue #2. Read More
When we last left Conan back in December, he and his two companions — Zephra (daughter of Conan’s old foe, the wizard Zukala), and Elric (ruler of an otherworldly realm called Melniboné) had just fended off an attack by Prince Gaynor the Damned and his Chaos Pack of beast-men. We now pick up the tale where Conan the Barbarian #14 left off, as presented by the same storytellers — plotters Michael Moorcock (creator of Elric) and James Cawthorn, scripter Roy Thomas, artist Barry Windsor-Smith, and co-inker (with Windsor-Smith) Sal Buscema: Read More
In October, 1971, the letters column in the back of Conan the Barbarian #13 alerted readers to the fact that the Marvel Comics series — which had been coming out monthly ever since issue #4 back in January — was going to a bi-monthly schedule;
In truth, Conan #13 was very nearly the last issue of the title — at least for a while. As the series’ writer and de facto editor, Roy Thomas, would explain decades later in his book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Vol. 1 (Pulp Hero Press, 2018): Read More
Continuing the blog’s commemoration of Giant-Size Marvel Month, we have today an unusual entry — one of only two 25-cent, 48-page Marvel comic books published in August, 1971 that was the second issue of its title to appear in the new format. (The other, if you’re wondering, was the partially-new, partially-reprint Rawhide Kid #93.) As we covered in last month’s Conan #10 post, a number of Marvel titles made the jump to 25 ¢/48 pages in July, anticipating the increase in price and size the rest of the line would make a month later. But since most of them weren’t published monthly, only a couple managed to get out two issues in the new format before Marvel publisher Martin Goodman abruptly pulled the plug at the end of August, dropping the page count back down to the old standard of 32 pages — though lowering the price only to 20 cents, so that buyers were now spending a nickel more for the “classic” standard-size Marvel comic than they had been before the July-August jump. Read More
One week ago, in our post about Amazing Spider-Man #101, we shared the two lead items from the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page that ran in that issue (as well as in other Marvel comics shipping in July, 1971), which explained how, due to editor Stan Lee taking a couple of weeks off his comics-scripting duties to work on a screenplay, other writers would be temporarily stepping in to handle his titles.
But Stan’s sabbatical wasn’t the only big news out of Marvel that month, as was indicated by the very next Bulletin: Read More
Conan the Barbarian #8 was the third consecutive issue of the Marvel Comics series that I bought, and the fourth overall. But it was the first one that had the map.
By “the map“, I am of course referring to this work of imaginative cartography, familiar to virtually everyone who read Marvel’s Conan comics even occasionally back in the day:
In January I posed about Conan the Barbarian #4, the first issue I’d ever picked up of Marvel Comics’ series featuring Robert E. Howard’s pulp hero. As I wrote at the time, my thirteen-year-old self was quite favorably impressed by the efforts of writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith in that comic — impressed enough that I feel fairly certain that I meant to buy the next issue when it came out. Somehow, though, I didn’t manage to do so. I suppose it’s possible that I never actually saw Conan #5 on the stands; but if that’s true, that was the last time that kind of thing ever happened. Because with #6, I was back on board, and would thenceforth faithfully acquire every issue through #118 (Jan., 1981), some 9 1/2 years later. (The occasion for my dropping the book then was Roy Thomas’ exit a few issues earlier; as far as I was concerned, Thomas was Conan’s official biographer, and without him at the series’ helm, it just wasn’t the same.) Read More
For me as a young reader in early 1971, the road to Robert E. Howard’s fantasy realms of the Hyborian Age — and Marvel Comics’ version of the same — led through the equally imaginary landscapes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.
This was true despite the fact that, just one year earlier, I probably wouldn’t even have been able to tell you what the word “fantasy” meant, at least in terms of genre. Science fiction, horror, mystery, Western, romance — I had at least a rudimentary understanding of all of those, even at age twelve. But fantasy? What was that? Read More
As the year 1970 wound down, it seemed that mainstream American comic books had, at last, embraced the “sword and sorcery” fantasy subgenre in all its pulpy glory. After some tentative moves in that direction — courtesy of DC Comics’ three “Nightmaster” issues of Showcase in 1969, which were followed in 1970 by Marvel’s publication of several S&S short tales in its new horror anthology titles like Chamber of Darkness and Tower of Shadows — Marvel finally jumped into the deep-end of the pool in July, 1970, with a licensed adaptation of the field’s most prototypical character, Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Read More