It’s #FantasyComicsMonth and I’ve been saving the entire run of King Conan (later retitled Conan the King) for now. I had gotten interested in the series a few years ago when I got a copy of issue #27 in a grab bag from my LCS. Prior to that, I’d never read that many Conan comic books, although I was a fan of the Schwarzenegger movies and do enjoy a good fantasy tale. That particular issue was compelling enough for me to buy the next few from the back issue bins, which was easy and cheap because they were all less than $2.00; then, I had collected so many of them that I decided “Why not just buy the whole run and read it from beginning to end?”

So, over the course of what had to be a couple of years (I want to say I got that first issue in 2022), I would check my LCS as well as bins at the Baltimore con to see if I could fill the holes I needed. It was surprisingly easy except for maybe the last year’s worth of issues (as it tends to be with some of these titles–I remember finding the last few issues of The ‘Nam was particularly annoying). Earlier this year, my LCS acquired issue #42, which was the last one I needed. And here we are.

When it comes to the character of Conan, I think the King Conan title appealed to me because it was about the character many years after the Conan the Barbarian adventures, and that meant it might prove to be an interesting take on the Barbarian character. The later years of characters like that are usually really interesting, especially in the hands of a capable writer, and so far the writing team on the issues I’ve read have been two good ones: Roy Thomas and Doug Moench. I wasn’t surprised to see Thomas as the writer with John Buscema and Ernie Chan on art because I know that they have a long history with the character; however, my experience with Doug Moench has always been with Batman, especially in the Knightfall era of the 1990s. But I will say that I was a little wary of the first several issues.

Why? Well, looking at the covers, I wondered if the title was going to take a little while to get beyond the “villain of the week” type of format that I remember a lot of early issues of well-loved series from this era having. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if I’m using G.I. Joe as a barometer, I found that it took a little bit to get its long-term storyline going after at least a few issues of “one and dones” with some through-lines. In these twelve issues, Thomas, working off of mythology that he established (well, adapted, really) in more than 100 issues of Conan the Barbarian as well as nearly 50 issues of the Savage Sword of Conan magazine, he picks up at least a good 10-15 years into Conan’s reign in Aqualonia, where he has been ruling a peaceful kingdom. I’m not sure how we got from Barbarian to King, but this is a slightly more civilized character who has a family and whose son, Prince Cronn, is a major character.

The series opens with Conan facing off against Thoth-Amon, whose first appearance in the comics goes all the way back to issue #7 of Conan the Barbarian. Through the rest of the first year, he’s fighting various sorcerers and monsters and there’s a multi-issue arc where his wife, Zenobia, has been kidnapped to a faraway land and he has to go find her, which was a cool way to get Conan wandering again and fighting all sorts of different types of soldiers and fellow Barbarians. So it was what I expected it to be, but compelling and beautifully drawn–especially by Buscema on pencils. In fact, when he left the book (and I assume he was only going to do a few issues of it just to get off the ground, as was Roy Thomas), I noticed a slight dropoff in the art, but not in a way that made me want to stop reading. If anything, Doug Moench was a welcome change in writing because as much as I enjoyed Thomas’ issues, they had a tendency to be very densely written and that sometimes slowed things down, which I have found is sometimes the case with his books. No disrespect to the creator, but there are times when his style of writing really serves the book well (All-Star Squadron) and other time when reading the books make you a little tired (Infinity Inc.). This fell somewhere between (although I’d read the hell out of Roy Thomas and John Buscema adapting something like The Odyssey or Beowulf).

But this first year of issues? Really solid. I like the take on the character and find that Conn is a really great Robin to his Batman, not some sort of annoying Scrappy Doo type that you want the writer to jettison right away. And there’s plenty of action. It’s been a cool look inside comics that were definitely “too old for me” when I was a kid.

I’ll be doing my rating on this one later after I have finished the entire series; for now, I’m looking forward to what the second year of the book holds.