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Curse Of The Golden Skull first appeared in Conan The Barbarian #37, published in full colour. Drawn by Neal Adams, I can't remember now whether it was originally intended to appear in a black & white mag, but it was eventually reprinted in the '80s in Conan Saga #8, above, in just such a medium. For those of you who haven't seen the pages in 'monochrome', check below and 'fill yer boots' (as they say).
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8 comments:
I love this strip in colour but in black and white its even better. I remember seeing this in black and white when it appeared in the UK weekly "The Avengers and Conan". Now I need to track down Conan Saga 8.
I never saw this issue of Conan Saga when it came out, but what a great artistic line-up with Windsor-Smith, John and Sal Buscema, John Severin and Adams all at their peak, all behind a stupendous cover. Pure magic.
I have to admit a preference for the colour version, McS, but luckily I have both. I can't remember whether or not I actually saw the strip in The Avengers & Conan mag, but it's likely that I did.
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Conan Saga was a great mag and lasted for a good wee while, S64. If I recall correctly, I have around the first 60 issues or so. I'll have to check and see if any are missing from my collection and track them down.
Thanks for going to the trouble of scanning and posting, these pages, Kid. I think my preference is for the B&W version over the colour comic, although having seen those B&W John Romita pages of Satanna over at McScotty's blog, I think that these Conan pages would have benefitted from a gray wash to add depth to the imagery. Still, it's great to discover these comics for the first time all these years later.
I don't always say this about the work of Neal Adams but I prefer this in color. It's pretty dang good regardless.
That's why I prefer the colour pages, B & RJ, because they have depth that the b&w ones lack. They'd certainly have benefitted from a grey wash. Funny how the same pages in a different medium divides opinion, eh?
This was a weird story - originally written as a 34 page epic for savage sword it was based on an L Sprague de Camp tale but legal disagreements between him and Marvel caused problems so they had to rejig things but they already had 6 pages of art drawn - up to the rhino attack - so Thomas restructured the rest of the tale but as it was 34 pages restructured to 19 pages there was a lot of cut scenes and many pages have very small panels just to fit the story in. No-one can recall why the original story was swapped from Savage Sword to the colour comic but I reckon it was money because a colour Adams story would sell much better than a b/w magazine story. Adams didn't have much luck on Conan because his next tale in Savage Sword had to be rushed through and inked by many different hands because of a misunderstanding on the deadline. A real pity that because the first few pages were pure classic Adams but it really looked loose and rushed after that.
Thanks for the backstory, MN. I seem to remember reading about it years ago in an article by Roy Thomas, but I couldn't remember the precise details and I'm far too lazy to trawl through my Conan material to refresh my memory. It seems that Adams often had a problem with deadlines according to editors he worked with.
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