Apparently Dark Horse has shelved the Conan project after rejecting the script and asking for massive rewrites and indefinitely delayed the hardcover collections of the Grindberg Tarzan material. Grindberg is none too happy with DH right now based on some recent posts.

-M

Well that's a good way to piss in my Cheerios

I think Conan's time at Dark Horse may be winding down. The last issue of Conan the Slayer is due out this month (#12) and aside from the Conan vs. Wonder Woman mini, there's no Conan books scheduled for Dark Horse in any of the announced solicitations. With the cancellation of the Thomas/Giorello project before it got off the ground, no ongoing, and the poor sales on the last Truman/Giorello King Conan mini, and form what I gather poor presales on the second Conan omnibus, I am not sure it's worth DH's time o keep the license. here was a Kull mini announced form IDW, the first isse of which hit, but the rest has been delayed indefinitely, so I am just not sure there is enough of a market out there to keep the license viable for any of the big 5 publishers. Conan may have to lay fallow for a while until the market changes or someone can put together a series that has some growth potential, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Conan has a hardcore fan base, but it's small and it's not something that looks to have any appeal to a larger, younger demographic right now to create any growth potential.


-M

My personal feeling is they should skip distributors, and just crowdfund (Kickstarter or something else) OGN adventures and/or adaptations and sell direct to customers without worrying about trying to convince retailers to shell out dollars and give up shelf space for a product that only has a 5-7K customer base with zero growth potential. But that might shortchange sales even more. I am not sure, but in a crowded market there's just no room for growth for this type of book despite the popularity of fantasy in other mediums. Dark Horse tried bringing in name talent (Wood, Bunn, Van Lente) that has cache with the younger wider comics demographic, but it didn't bring people to Conan and alienated the fan base. They's tried crossovers (Groo, Sonja, Wonder Woman) to get hype and attention on the book, it hasn't worked. I just don't see there being much of a viable market for it right now. I said elsewhere, and I'll repeat here, it very much feels like Marvel and Conan in the mid-late 90s where they were throwing everything Conan at the wall after SSoC and CTB were done to see if anything stuck in an attempt to hang on to the license, and none of it stuck in that market. It took a few years of the character laying fallow an putting Busiel and Nord on the book at another publisher to renew interest enough to make it viable again, and they still needed that 25 cent zero issue to get people to look at it. Nothing Conan is sticking tot he wall right now. It might be time t let it go fallow for a while and see if things change. God knows Paradox isn't capable of doing anything to renew interest in the properties.

-M

Dark Horse put Roy on for 12 issues, the Road of king series and it sold poorer than either series before and after it, so I don't think that's going to work. The tried doing a bi-monthly/quarterly prestige format anthology featuring Conan called Savage Sword of Robert E. Howard and it sold like crap, so that's not going to work either. They need to look forward, not try to find answers in the past because it's a completely different market today than it was 20 years ago and nothing that only appeals to the hardcore base is going to do well in the Diamond market.


-M

Of all the artists who have worked on Conan comics, I feel Cary Nord has come closest to capturing what REH had on the page, the lithe pantherish powerful Conan, and also captured the Frazetta vibe in his work.

Smith's Conan is beautiful but he doesn't always feel powerful or dangerous. Buscema's Conan is seen as the standard, but for me he is too bulky and not lithe and pantherish enough to fit the way Howard conceived him, and is the main influence on the Arnie casting as a muscle-bound Conan which transformed the perception and path of the character in pop culture, which in turn influenced all the artists working on Conan in the 90s where he became a steroid freak. Nord had a nice balance between the two extremes of Smith and Conan, and his Conan wore armor and used weapons much as Conan did in the Howard tales and didn't cavort around in a loincloth or fur diaper to keep some kind of Marvel hero union suit regulation intact.

Nord's take wasn't perfect. There was some room for improvement in his page to page and panel to panel storytelling at times, but as for his depiction of Conan capturing what Howard put on the page, I think he was the pinnacle of the Conan artists. Now some of the artists who have depicted Conan in other artistic venues (especially those who illustrated the Del Rey editions of the Howard tales in particular Gary Gianni) are just as good if not better than Nord at capturing the Howardesque feel of Conan's look.

Now I think Buscema, Smith and some of the other artists did a very good job with Conan and are immensely talented, but I don't think they captured Howard's Conan as well as Nord. My pet theory is that most of the Marvel artists (and Roy himself) were working form the de Camp/Carter influenced depictions of Conan in the pastiches and their edits of Howard's tales, which is where I started with Conan too, but the Conan of those stories to me feels like a diluted version of the character once you read the pure Howard versions free of de Camp and Carter's influence. Conan is more primal and the descriptions of him feel more visceral. Busiek and Nord (and the del Rey illustrators) were using the Howard texts and not the de Camp edits for their source material, and to me it made a difference in the depiction of Conan in their work.

-M