Reading – Conan The Newspaper Strips Volume One

Although pulp-era author Robert E. Howard wrote stories in numerous genres, it is his Conan character that continues to keep Howard’s name firmly locked in in our minds. I personally prefer Solomon Kane (see my earlier reading posts: Castle of the Devil and Death’s Black Riders), but Howard’s Conan stories are also quite entertaining and worth reading (Howard’s Conan books on Amazon.com*). And, if you want to look beyond the short stories, novellas, and novels that exist, there are many comics out there. Today, as you likely already know if you read the title of this post, we’re taking a peek at the Roy Thomas newspaper strips of the late seventies.

Roy Thomas, John Buscema, and Ernie Chan

Before getting into examining Conan: The Newspaper Strips Volume One* I thought it useful to take a quick peek at the three creators behind the strips in the book. Skip down if you’re more interested in the book than the people behind it.

• Roy Thomas (Wikipedia) may very well be the expert on Conan I respect the most. He was instrumental in bringing Conan to Marvel Comics back in the seventies (his essay in the first volume of the Chronicles of Conan series* is quite entertaining and educational) and his Conan: The Ultimate Guide* is a must-read book for anyone with even the slightest interest in the character.

• John Buscema (Wikipedia) is one of those artists that any comic fan of the seventies or eightes must know . . . even if they don’t realize that they know his work. For me, Buscema’s style is forever locked in my mind as the man behind those older Conan comics — I remember buying Savage Sword issues at garage sales in the early eighties — and the artwork/tutorials inside How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way*. As with a lot of comic readers my age Buscema’s work started to look dated in the nineties, but today I can really start to appreciate his style. His style is classic for a reason, and not only because most of Buscema’s work is decades old.

• Ernie Chan (Wikipedia), I hate to admit, is an artist who I simply did not know of until I started reading Conan: The Newspaper Strips Volume One*. Looking over the list of Chan’s work it seems incredible that I didn’t recognize his name; I know I’ve read several of those comics over the years. It’s a sad reflection of my comic knowledge that I didn’t recognize Chan’s name.

The Newspaper Stories

Wikipedia reports that the Conan strips ran from September 4, 1978 to April 12, 1981. I was living in Turkey for a large part of that time, so it’s not surprising that I only have vague memories of the comic; and besides, I was so young then that I wasn’t really “reading” storylines so much as reading individual strips every now and then.

During the strip’s life, according to the list at Wikipedia, the Conan daily/Sunday strip ran a total of 16 different storylines. Conan: Newspaper Strips* collects the first nine of those stories into a single book that, other than a small number of issues, is an excellent collection. If you’ve always wanted to read these stories then grab the book . . . but not until you fully accept the book’s problems.

Problem One: No Introductory Essay

A truly shocking and unexpected problem, because generally Dark Horse does a fantastic job of getting introductions for their books. I bought the book at a local Hastings and immediately cracked it open when I got home . . . only to discover that there is no introduction or afterword. This still continues to stun me, because there’s absolutely no reason that Dark Horse couldn’t have found someone — Roy Thomas, maybe? — to say a few words about the strip. I know the lack of an introduction doesn’t harm the comic stories in any way, but I love introductions to books and the lack of one feels like a massive oversight.

Problem Two: Poor Reproduction

Several of the strips are rough, the linework jagged and looking like something that was scanned from a poor photocopy. I understand that these comic strips are very old and perfect masters may not exist, but I would have happily paid $50 for the collection if Dark Horse had gone to the trouble to repair the strips. What we get in the book is readable, but this is definitely not an archival-quality work and I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before someone steps in and produces a remastered and improved collection of the strips. Which would be a great thing, since . . .

Problem Three: The Color Strips Are Too Small

The first ten or eleven color strips in the book — the Sunday comics — fill the page nicely, packed neatly on the page and large enough to easily read. After that, though, the color strips are shorter — two rows of panels instead of three rows — and they’re run quite small and centered on the page. The color strips fill the page width fine, but there’s a ton of which space above and below the strip. In a perfect work Dark Horse would have designed the book around these color strips, using a page size that would neatly hold the strips at a larger size.

Yes, that would have resulted in the B&W strips not neatly filling each page, but the open white space around those B&W strips could have been used for annotations. It is sad that Dark Horse’s budget for the book didn’t leave room for any actual writing; the color strips as they appear in the book would have benefited greatly had Roy Thomas been called in to write annotations to fill the empty space on the color strip pages.

But even then most of the color strips would have been too small.

Problem Four: One Strip is Missing

Above is the single strip that is missing in the book. Dark Horse editor Dave Land posted last fall to apologize for the missing strip, but that apology does not make it easy to recommend the book to any but the most dedicated of Conan fans. And worse yet the missing strip is right at the end of the second storyline, The Wizards Daughter, so unless you go to the Dark Horse site and find the missing strip you’re left not completely sure what just happened.

A very frustrating mistake.

Closing Thoughts

Conan: The Newspaper Strips Volume One* could have been an astounding collection of a classic, but the mistakes (and lack of any introduction or discussion of the stories and strip) turn this from great to merely okay. And okay just simply isn’t good enough when it comes to publishing what should have been a must-own item for any Conan fan’s collection.

The problems with this book will in no way keep me from buying Dark Horse’s other Conan books, or a second volume of newspaper strips, but the mistakes do mean that I cannot recommend this book. And that makes me sad, because I seriously wanted to love this book when I bought it.

But not every book in my collection can be a masterpiece, and the failures of this book leave me with the hope that some day we will see a truly impressive collection.