Thread by @Comrade_Bullski

With several bigger projects on the back burner the purchases I made the other day ignited my desire to talk to you fine folks about this guy.

So let's talk about Conan the Barbarian and how his decades-long award-winning first tenure at Marvel ended. It gets weird.

This will be a slightly improvised thread so please bear with me.

But it's a topic dear to my heart as I grew up reading Conan, both in comics and novel form. You might say I was a fan, though that fandom has been tempered by age.

I don't think I need to go into how Conan was created, who Robert E. Howard was, the topics and themes of the stories or the tumultuous publishing history they had. Much better scholars than I have dissected the background of Howard and his creations in excruciating detail.

Instead let us fast forward almost four decades after Howard's untimely death. In 1970 Marvel launched the ongoing comic Conan the Barbarian which chronicled the journey undertaken by the title character in rough chronological order. At least at first.

The original creative team on the title was Marvel editor, writer and former superfan Roy Thomas and future superstar artist Barry (Windsor) Smith. And the title was a hit, quickly rising on the sales charts and generating more interest in fantasy titles in the industry.

After some experimentation Marvel added The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian to their magazine lineup in 1974. This title was in black and white, oversized and usually contained two full-length stories and lots of additional material per issue.

Due to the ongoing success of Conan, Marvel kept launching spin-off series that enjoyed varying degrees of success. There was King Conan/Conan the King about his later years, several Red Sonja solo comics, graphic novels and the reprint title Conan Saga.

Thomas stepped down from writing Conan the Barbarian in 1980 and Savage Sword in 1980, which led to a long series of other writers to try their hand at the titles. Results varied, but it was clear that the Conan titles were somewhat rudderless for much of the 80s.

Thomas had adapted all of Howard's original stories and most of the pastiche stories from the Lancer books during his decade on the titles, leaving little for subsequent writers.

With Savage Sword jumping around in Conan's timeline and Barbarian following a linear narrative, the canon stories had acted as vital linchpins in the Barbarian epic, which Thomas knew exactly how to exploit after some early fumbling.

When Thomas left, the structure of the freewheeling Savage Sword was less affected, but it was very clear that Barbarian was now no longer following a stringent narrative. New writers would jump on, write some isolated adventures and not care about moving Conan forward.

Some creative teams filled this void with story arcs which did not connect to any Howard or pastiche story but stood on their own and yet presented a lengthy and coherent run, such as the Christopher Priest and Geoff Isherwood storyline of Conan vs the Devourer of Souls

By 1990, however, Conan the Barbarian seemed to be in trouble. New creative team of Michael Higgins and Ron Lim launched an ambitious 9-issue saga about Conan's origins, his secret destiny and the tragic events surrounding the fabled raid on Venarium.

This run was meant to revitalize the title for the 90s but was widely criticized even at the time for making Conan a standard fated bloodline hero and having a much lighter tone and style than anyone expected. Also Conan's mom gets killed by werewolves.

With the end of this "young Conan" saga in #240, it was surprisingly announced that Roy Thomas himself was returning to the title he once helped start, and many fans saw this as a great sign that things would turn around.

Thomas quickly returned the title to its original format and began slowly moving Conan towards his next big canon story, while fleshing out small notes into entire storylines seeing the return of characters like Kulan Gath, the Hyperboreans and others.

Thomas even brought back characters such as Isparana and Fafnir Hellhand and had Conan clash with the Devourer of Souls once again. But unfortunately by 1994 the writing was on the wall. Conan just wasn't selling anymore, not like Marvel wanted it to.

Fantasy is notorious for waxing and waning in popularity with audiences but I don't think the mid-90s were necessarily anti-fantasy. The slump on Conan was probably just diminishing returns due to a decade of very fluctuating quality and the comic book market bubble bursting

In late 1993 Marvel took the decision to combine the two Conan comics into one to stabilize sales on both. Conan the Barbarian ended with issue 275 and the narrative continued as the backup feature in Savage Sword, beginning with #218.

With the obvious loss of the color, this meant you could still kind of pretend you were still reading the same comic. Just, you know, packed into a magazine with another story and some miscellaneous stuff. But this would not even last a year.

Conan the Adventurer hit stands in summer of 1994, around six months after the final issue of Barbarian. Ironically Thomas and Rafael Kayanan used the exact same pitch as the ill-fated Higgins run had with this title and set it back at Conan's very beginning - the Venarium raid

Far from the more young adult stylings of that run, however, Adventurer hit the ground with a brutal, graphic level of violence, vengeance and tons of battle sequences. Despite the creative team it definitely felt more influenced by the excess of the 90s than the previous title.

If you're keeping track, in 1994 you could read a color comic about young Conan just starting out (sequential) then a black and white comic about adult Conan continued from Barbarian (sequential) and then a random, non-sequential story from any time period.

As noted, Adventurer especially also went hard on the 90s aesthetic. Characters the size of buildings with massive armor, muscles more exaggerated than big John Buscema could ever have dreamed and strange designs everywhere.

In summer of 1995, after only 14 issues, Conan the Adventurer ended. At the same time Savage Sword of Conan was canceled and with it the final of the original batch of Conan comics was gone. Marvel once more wanted change.

The confusingly titled "Conan" took the place of Adventurer the very next month, and with it came an even more over the top 1990s cover design, a horrible new logo and an all-new creative team.

Written by long-time G.I. Joe scribe Larry Hama, this title starts at an unspecified time in Conan's career with little connection to anything else and is absolutely CRIPPLED by the confusing, messy artwork by Barry Crain.

The first three issues are so muddled and confusing artistically that it's hard to even know what the story is going for, leaving you with over-the-top fight scenes and bad mid-90s computer effects.

With "Conan" replacing Adventurer the new Conan the Savage replaced Savage Sword as the black-and-white magazine for the barbarian. Once again the cover design is just awful, detracting from a goddamn Bisley cover painting.

The Savage once again has two full-length story, with the lead being a serialized story by writer Chuck Dixon and Argentinian artist Enrique Alcatena, who really elevates this story with his amazing B&W artwork.

Backing up these were several stories by Thomas and a varying stable of amazing artists which jumped around in Conan's career, including going back to his time with Bêlit.

Conan the Savage #9 published in spring of 1996 is also to my knowledge the final Conan/Red Sonja story prior to Marvel selling the rights to Sonja off. I'm still not sure exactly why, but I assume they needed the money.

They had taken one final stab at making a Sonja solo series happen in 1995 with the Scavenger Hunt special, but despite the abundance of "bad girl" comics at the time (or maybe because of it?) this was the Hyrkanian she-devil's swan song at Marvel.

Sonja had been a popular supporting character in the Conan titles almost since the beginning, and her loss is still felt, outside of odd crossovers. Thomas would try to bring her back in 1999 but that title (and its publisher) were stillborn.

Let's backtrack to winter 1995. Conan was suddenly embroiled in a three-part crossover with the Malibu Ultraverse character Rune, the most famous installment of which was Conan vs Rune #1, written and drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith

The issue is predictably dark, gory and very beautiful to look at, and unfortunately it is locked in some kind of double copyright purgatory hell. Such a shame.

The much less celebrated chapters in the crossover took place in Conan #4 by Hama and Crain...

...and Conan the Savage #4 by Dixon and Alcatena. This one also looks fantastic, not gonna lie.

If you want to learn more about Rune and the Malibu Ultraverse, check out my retrospective on it in my profile. Suffice to say that crossovers with main Marvel characters was something they tried in 1995-96 and then quickly dropped, along with the Ultraverse characters

Now as interesting as some of the stuff from this era is, there's no way to get away from the fact that Hama and Dixon's Conan has quickly become a generic fantasy hero, complete with flying ships, giant gods, magic swords activated by destined heroes...

We have gone so far beyond where the original comic started (not even mentioning the original stories) that the Conan titles in late 1995 and 1996 feel more like heavy metal album covers come to life, and sometimes are about as sensical.

Special shout-out to Conan #7 (Feb 1996) for having a non-crossover with Iron Man? Like that's the Iron Man logo there scrambled up, and the character is a power armor user... but not connected to Iron Man at all. Bizarre. Great Bret Blevins art for the story tho.

Conan the Savage ended with issue 10 (cover-dated May 1996) and had at that point gotten rid of the main ongoing story entirely to just present random stories from Conan's life again. The final issue saw Roy Thomas and John Buscema do a sequel to the "Conan of the Isles" GN