One of the titles that I haven’t really been writing about much on this blog but that I have been slowly collecting is the 1980s Marvel series King Conan (later titled Conan the King). I wound up with a copy of issue #27 in a Marvel grab bag from my LCS once, loved the story, and decided to buy the issues following it so that I could read the continuation. This led to me wanting more of the book and at this point, I have every issue except for #42. I’ve decided to wait until I find that issue so I can do a complete read-through, so that’s not what this post is about. But I bring it up because prior to this, I only had a passing interest in any of the Conan comics and really didn’t know the character beyond the two Arnold Schwarzenegger films (the first one of which is a classic). I’d seen some books by Robert E. Howard in my public library back during the days when I’d comb the paperback section for Star Trek novels, but never picked one up. (side note: one day, I’m really going to do a full post or podcast episode about the library and how important it was to me as a kid and still is).

A couple of weekends ago, at the Baltimore Comic-Con, I was diving through a bin of comics looking for that elusive last Conan the King issue when I came across The Official Handbook of the Conan Universe. This is a one-shot published in 1985 that takes the OHOTMU model and applies it to the Conan titles that Marvel had now been publishing for the better part of ten years. I’d seen DC do similar things with Who’s Who, applying the concept to Star Trek and Legion of Super-Heroes, and I own all of the G.I. Joe: The Order of Battle, so the idea that a Conan one existed wasn’t too far-fetched. At the same time, I had no idea that this existed. And since I had money to burn, I added it to my pile.

The book has a gorgeous Michael Kaluta cover that was originally supposed to be a depiction of The Battle of Helms Deep for a Tolkien-based project but for various reasons was not used and Kaluta reworked into a Conan piece. On the inside cover is a biography of Robert E. Howard, and throughout the book are entries about the people, places, and things that appear in the Conan books with the center pages being a map of the world. The writing is what you’d expect from an Official Marvel Handbook–dense and in small type–but unlike those times when OHOTMU can get tedious, this was captivating. Perhaps it’s because I’m really not that familiar with the Conan “universe”, or perhaps it’s because this is a whole other world instead of superheroes in a world we’re more or less familiar with.

At any rate, I’ve read this cover to cover once and flipped through it a few times already. It’s made me want to see if I can find any of Howard’s stories on the cheap (I know there are collections but sometimes you can find paperbacks in used book stores), and has me excited to finish collecting this King Conan run. All this because I’m a sucker for an index/profile book, right?

Anyway, I have no idea how easy this is to come by in bins. Sometimes you get a whole pile of these types of books when you’re thumbing through back issues; other times, they’re a complete pain in the ass to find. Either way, even though my copy has some water stains on it, it was definitely worth the pickup.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep.