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It's a wet and windy day outside and I've not long taken delivery of Conan The Barbarian Epic Collection Volume 3. I finished reading Volume 4 last night and very much enjoyed it, so I'm looking forward to it's predecessor, purchased out-of-sequence, and perhaps even published that way. (The Epic books tend not to appear in chronological order, but maybe it was different with the Cimmerian's tomes.) I've now got the first four volumes in the series, and it's made me all too aware of just how few Conan colour mags I actually bought and read back in the day - a mere handful at most, as that's all I seem to remember while looking at them in reprint form.
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Of course, I read most of the Barry Smith illustrated tales when they appeared in the UK weekly Savage Sword Of Conan in the '70s, and the US monthly Conan Saga from the mid-to-late '80s, but they were in black and white. I also bought the UK Savage Sword of Conan monthly, so I'd previously read more b&w stories than colour ones when I was younger, though I'm now starting to catch up (if I haven't already). They're an extremely entertaining read, though I'm not entirely sure that I like Conan as a character, perhaps just preferring the solid storytelling and scripting abilities of Roy Thomas, whether based on Robert E. Howard's tales or not.
Anyway, thought you might like to see the covers of the first four books so that you know what to look for should you decide to acquire them for yourselves. (Update: I've now added Volumes 5 & 6.) I'll present them in reverse order just to make things interesting. But before you study the pretty piccies, were you a fan of Marvel's Conan mags way back when, and are you still today? If so, tell your fellow Crivvies what you liked about the mags, and say if you intend getting any of the reprint volumes. Ready? Then let's go...
(Note: Don't worry - Nemedian gremlins accounted for Volume 3 being repeated, instead of Volume 2. Now fixed.)
I'm already on record as an enormous fan of Marvel's Conan books. I jumped on with the first issue and snagged all of them I could find for several years. Loved Kull's color comic as well. I've picked up the first two Epics because I'm absolute sucker for Barry Smith's artwork of this era, but I have the books in reprint already and I cannot justify buying them again. I do prefer the Epics to the Dark Horse reprints from early this century but those have virtues as well.
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I didn't mind the Dark Horse reprints either, RJ, my main gripe being that they sometimes left off the 'Conan The Barbarian' banner from the top of the splash page, making it too short-looking. I actually quite liked the computer colouring. I've got the first four DH softcover collections, but I returned the fifth when I noticed the computer font relettering on the Buscema issues. The typos they made, oh dear! I didn't buy any more after that.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I liked the Dynamite facsimile of Red Sonja so much that I've just bought the Marvel original and am waiting for it to arrive. I've also just bought CTB #25, as it was John Buscema's first Conan issue.