About that Conan Power Records Album

A while back, I was made aware of an audio drama LP starring Conan. Reddit user IHaveSpoken000 posted it in r/ConantheBarbarian, and then the best Conan Youtuber Stygian Dogs, who owns a copy and did a video about it, showed up in the comments to discuss. It's a pretty cool little Conan curiosity!

Weirdly enough though, there is very little information about this LP out there! I've been trying to reach out to those who might know more, and I have a little bit to add, but not much.

We know that the illustrations were done by Neal Adams, and we know that the producer was Cornel Tanassy. Stygian Dogs knew that Len Wein was involved in writing at least one of the stories, "The Crawler in the Mists," with J.M. DeMatteis helping turn it into a full comic for Conan the Barbarian #116 in 1980. But mostly, everything else has been lost. We don't have voice actor credits at all!

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I reached out to Peter Pan Records, which is the owner of Power Records, the label that put the LP out, and my email was answered by the literal CEO of the company. Wild. Unfortunately, they had nothing new to offer us. I know 1976 was a long time ago, but I'm surprised that they don't have anything more in their archives than what's literally printed on the cover.

I have reached out to Continuity Studios to see if they have anything they could tell us, but I haven't received anything back yet. I'll update this post if they do respond.

Fortunately, I do have one new thing to add! I was browsing some old Savage Sword of Conan issues and came across an essay in the back of Savage Sword #40 about the Power Records release! Author of the essay Fred Blosser goes through each of the stories and notes the writing credits as he goes. We now know exactly to whom to credit each story.

"The Jewel of the Ages:" Plotted and scripted by Len Wein
"Shadow of the Stolen City:" Plotted by Len Wein and scripted by Roy Thomas
"The Thunder Dust:" Plotted by Len Wein and scripted by Roy Thomas
"The Crawler in the Mists:" Plotted and scripted by Len Wein

Fred also mentions that Roy Thomas wasn't overly thrilled that there was a comic book adaption of "The Crawler in the Mists" packaged with a 45 version of the audio drama seeing as that was now the first Marvel Conan comic that he didn't write (there would be many, many more very soon, though). 

​I'll put scans of that entire essay down below.

Stygian Dogs is fairly convinced that the narrator of the Power Records stories is voice actor Dick Tufeld. Tufeld sounds about right- he's got one of those voices that I think of as an AM radio voice- it's kind of powerful, but not overly deep, with just a little bit of scratch in it.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Neal's Continuity Studios will know a little bit more about the album. The fact that Fred mentions in his essay about how Neal said they didn't sell very well tells me that maybe his studio was a little more involved in the production than just being commissioned to do the art, but who knows? Maybe he just asked and they told him it was a bust.

One other cool thing that I found is that there are two other Conan audio drama LPs out there as well. Produced by Moondance Productions in 1975 and 1976, they're productions of existing Conan stories, unlike the Power Records originals. The 1975 album focuses on Howard classics: "The Tower of the Elephant" and "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." The 1976 record is almost all L. Sprague de Camp- it's even narrated by him! That one features "The Blood-Stained God" and "The Curse of the Monolith." I found the "Tower of the Elephant" record on Youtube, but not the rest. Luckily, their Discogs pages are pretty well-developed. We know the music and voice credits for both of them, and honestly, the 1975 record's cover fucking rips.

Included below is Fred Blosser's complete essay, "The (Almost) Forgotten Tales of Conan" from the back of SSOC #40. What an illustrative title that these were almost forgotten 45 years ago, and here we are, digging them up again in 2025!