Hopefully it's better than the Conan Road of Kings 12 issue mini Roy did for Dark Horse, which is his most recent Conan work, and by far his worst Conan work.

-M

Bad Thomas Conan on Road of Kings had me drop the series after trying 2 issues (I picked up the rest out of dollar and quarter bins much later to read it in full to give it a fair shake, but I haven't gotten to it yet). I will also point out that the series of minis Roy penned for Marvel after all the regular Conan series ended but before they lost the license (stuff like Death Covered in Gold, Flame & the Fiend, etc.) weren't very good either, readable, but not anything special. With the exception of the Brian Wood stuff, Road of Kings was the worse of the Dark Horse Conan stuff.

I am actually enjoying the new Marvel Conan. It's enjoyable and reads like the better Conan pastiche stuff, not like Howard, but then Marvel Conan never read like Howard and always read like some of the better Conan pastiche when it wasn't directly adapting Howard. So, for me, I'd rather read the current Marvel stuff than bad Thomas Conan.

-M

If you are referring to the project he was planning with Grindberg, I am not sure but I don't think so, as Grindberg spoke as if it was an all new story not attached to another existing Howard tale, but it could be something Roy reworked from that story to fit as a prequel to People of the Black Circle. Plus Grindberg had supposedly started the art on that one when the plug got pulled, and it would be kind of crappy of Roy to take that project and give it to another artist at another publisher with work so hard to come by for veteran artists in the industry right now.

-M

Personally, I thought it was still better than most of the Conan the adventurer run... but it did suffer from a tic Roy developed in his latter Conan work: making too many connections thanks to increasingly unbelievable coincidences. There was no particular reason for Conan to have met Prospero and Albiona while he was in his twenties, nor to have been involved in Namedides getting the Aquilonian crown. To me, that's like the Solo movie showing that it was Han's actions that allowed the rebellion to get started. The art by Mike Hawthorne was also ill-suited to Conan, I thought; I loved Hawthorne's work on Queen & country, but his Hyborian age didn't work for me. (I prefer his work in black and white, too).

Nevertheless, this new series will be a must-get for me: with Roy at the helm, it will be a «real» Marvel Conan story, set in the old continuity. 

Nice to see Roy Thomas back with Conan. Not so sure about Alan Davis, whose smooth, sleek style doesn't strike me as a good fit for the character. But who knows, maybe he'll surprise me. The sample above looks better than I would have expected, though still not really to my taste.