Barry Windsor-Smith and CONAN VS. RUNE

In 1975, comic artist Barry Windsor-Smith was coming off a run of 22 issues of Conan the Barbarian and several of the all-time best issues of Savage Sword of Conan. Both titles would become widely acknowledged as some of the greatest Marvel comics of the 1970s.

And then he quit comics.

For a while, at least.

Barry was disillusioned with the business side of comics in which editors and corporations made demands of artists and seemed to hate having to draw hordes of superhero characters for which he cared little. Barry left the commercial comic game for a few years. He founded The Studio, where he and other artists worked in New York City outside of the rat race of comics designed to sell floppies off the spinner rack. For a time, Barry tried to elevate the comics medium, working on adult-oriented fantasy stories.

Barry's style had evolved over the years from a simple Jack Kirby clone to an intricate, unmistakable personal brand. You can literally watch Barry develop his own touch in the pages of just a handful of Ka-Zar stories, allowing himself to make extensive use of shadows and elaborate hatching. He begins to draw characters with less friendly boxy features than artists like Kirby or Romita, and frequently gives faces small features with high cheekbones and deep contouring. As the 70s progressed and he worked away from comics aimed at kids, that style continued to evolve until it evoked an otherworldly and fable-like quality.

After drawing the comics for an in-universe comic artist in the Oliver Stone movie The Hand in 1981, Barry headed back to comics full-time.

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Barry returned to Marvel in 1983, after nearly 8 years away, working on a Marvel Fanfare title featuring The Thing and with Herb Trimpe on the title Machine Man. He picked the workflow back up quickly and was soon writing, penciling, and inking entire books by himself.

His output at Marvel was well-received, but limited. He only contributed to a few books a year, doing just a handful of superhero books for the rest of the 80s: a few X-Men here, some Fantastic Four there. Perhaps he knew he would get burned out again if he fully committed to the grind of daily comics work. His long-awaited quasi-return to Conan happened in 1987, when he painted nine gorgeous covers for the Conan reprint mag Conan Saga. Each cover is staggering, but Barry didn't always feel that way.

His first few were genuine artistic efforts, reflecting what he felt was his best-ever work on the character. By his sixth of nine covers, he was feeling less invested in the project. He openly says that it was his last cover that he felt like he was actually trying to create a "real picture" of Conan. For his final set, he doesn't disparage his own artwork, but considers them little more than elaborate pinups. Over the course of the 9 covers, he depicts action scenes, calm moments, and direct references to Robert E. Howard stories. Even Barry's phoned-in work is as good as most people's best.

Barry's work at Marvel continued for a time. He created the modern origin story for Wolverine in Weapon X,  experimenting with bold color and grotesque modifications to the character. During the comics boom of the early 90s, he bounced from Marvel to Valiant Comics to Malibu Comics, each trying to court him as a unique artistic voice to add to their bullpen.

​At Malibu, he created the character Rune, a disgusting vampire being with a skullet haircut and double-hinged jaw, giant bat wings, and mystical powers. Rune was both terrifying and pathetic; he was frequently down on his luck (forcing down the blood of alcoholics in alleyways) in addition to being a genuine super-powered threat. His self-titled book ran for a little less than 20 issues, at which point Malibu was bought by Marvel Comics, specifically to get ahold of their digital coloring techniques. Marvel cancelled all of Malibu's "Ultraverse" titles in 1994, including Rune.

Rune was now owned by the same publishing house that still had the rights to Conan, so Barry pitted the two titans against one another in 1995's Conan vs. Rune #1, whose issue number deceptively promises us more than one issue, though the story would technically be continued in Conan #4 and Conan the Savage #4 (neither of which would be written or drawn by Barry). It was the first time since his 1973 adaption of "Red Nails" that Barry had worked on an actual Conan story. I can't find online whether it was pitched by the company hoping to cross-pollinate its fanbases or by Barry himself, pairing some of his oldest work with his newest.

In Conan vs. Rune, the Cimmerian wanders the wastes of Turan in a state of desperation when he happens to cross a seemingly dead city. The city is not entirely unoccupied, Conan soon realizes, when he becomes trapped inside and hears something horrific outside eating his horse.

Most of the city's inhabitants have been completely eviscerated, though, with piles of human flesh and sinew strewn throughout the darkened ruins. Hey, this was a 90s comic after all. Conan meets a lone survivor who tells him of their clan finding a dark, god-like creature in the desert, who they nursed back to health. Once healthy, this god being turned on them (Surprise! It's Rune.) and sucked the life out of most of the city. Conan challenges the evil being and the two do battle.

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The story is gloriously violent and gory, making full use of Conan's power and Rune's malevolence. 

The artwork is stellar too: Barry renders Conan a little beefier here than he had when penciling his Conan the Barbarian issues back in the early 70s. Design-wise, he's drawn a little closer to the Platonic ideal of Conan that John Buscema created. Rune has ditched the skullet for a samurai top-bun and a set of black armor, making him more imposing than ever. 

Barry Windsor-Smith's official site details a spat that Barry had with the colorists before the book was published. As noted before, Malibu was one of the first comic companies using digital coloring, which was mostly done for Barry's art by Albert Calleros. But Albert had left Malibu before Conan vs. Rune, leaving other, more amateurish colorists to fill in. The result was disastrous and removed the fantastical quality from Barry's art. I remember thinking this style of digital coloring looked kind of cool when I stared at the comics on the magazine rack at Safeway when I was 10 years old in 2001, but by 2008 when I was checking out trade paperbacks of Ultimate X-Men from my high school library, it looked painfully dated.

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Barry's hand-painted color guide versions on the left. The digital coloring version on the right.

Barry threatened to sue Marvel if they went forward with publishing the digitally-colored version. He quickly touched-up some of his painted color guides and those were the ones used in the final print, still not up to Barry's standards since he claims they were scanned in poorly.

While I'm usually pretty averse to crossover comics and stuff that reeks of marketing, Conan vs. Rune is a really cool one-shot. The story won't change anyone's life, but the artwork is beautiful through and through.

While Marvel's marketing states that Conan #4 would continue the story begun here, Rune's presence amounts to little more than a teaser at the end of that book. Conan the Savage #4, the ostensible conclusion, is more of a real story, but doesn't make a ton of sense. That issue written by Chuck Dixon is a King Conan story, implying that Rune has apparently been hanging out in the Hyborian age for at least a few decades without doing much of note. Additionally, he's drawn without the knobby knees or grotesque features that Barry gave him, making him a far more one-dimensional gargoyle supervillain. It makes him less interesting.

After reading more of Barry's 90s work, I've wanted to check out some of his other creations like Archer & Armstrong, but much of it has not been collected into accessible paperbacks. The way Barry tells it, he's routinely reached out to Marvel to discuss reprinting old material or even augmenting titles like Weapon X with bonus artwork and story pages, but they seem uninterested or they outright ghost him.

If you haven't read Barry's Monsters, published in 2021, it's incredible. Certainly in my list of top 3 comics published this decade so far. Barry is an artist in not just literally, but in the most philosophical sense of the word. He can elevate even a gory, 90s fight one-off into something better, and I hope that we see more of his work hitting the printer again soon.