Check out these cool old German CONAN DER BARBAR Comics

I just spent two weeks in Germany- my first time really out of the US. Whenever I visit anywhere new, I always search for a couple of things on Google Maps: cool punk bars or venues, used book and record stores, and most importantly, comic shops. We went to Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau near the French border, and Munich, and I got to hit up comic shops in both Berlin and Freiburg.

Comics are published a little differently in Europe than they are here in the States; today, Panini Comics reprints a lot of Marvel and DC stuff (my brother once visited Paris and brought back a Panini book that had a sampler of comics in it, much like old Shonen Jump magazines that had one issue from five or six series at a time). Sometimes the formats and titles are a changed a bit, and I imagine some titles don't make it from the States to Europe at all. That made it a little hard for me to navigate Modern Graphics, the comic shop in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin. Side note: Kreuzberg fucking rules and I would go back any time. They did have a room of English titles there, but nothing too exciting, mostly 2010s-era Marvel Conan stuff.

X Für U in Freiburg im Breisgau

Freiburg's shop was much cooler as far as I'm concerned. Freiburg's a cute city right next to the Black Forest and made me realize that every mountain town here in Colorado like Vail and Aspen are all trying to be Freiburg and the like. It has a university there, and right next to the school is a comic shop called X Für U. They had some really cool English and German comics, with a great selection of Conan stuff toward the back of the shop. My eye was immediately caught by how many of these 1980s Conan reprints they had called Conan Der Barbar, which you can probably already tell is "Conan the Barbarian" in German. They had a whole slew of them and I wish I wasn't travelling at the time with limited backpack space. They all have six to nine issues of Conan reprinted in their pages.

I bought three of the titles, #8, 15, and 16 for 2 Euros apiece since those were all the lowest numbers they had and my only other thought was to just pick by cover art since I had a train to catch and didn't have time to flip through all of them.

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Apparently, the publisher Condor Verlag held the rights to publishing Marvel properties in Germany from the mid-1980s through the mid-90s. Honestly, the best source I could find on them is this Transformers fan wiki that lays out quite a bit. According to them, Condor was infamous for publishing stories weirdly out of order or in issues that made them hard to follow, made ugly changes to art and text, and made their own covers in weirdly amateurish ways. None of that was super surprising to learn after flipping through these guys.

Volume #8 is a reprinting of Conan the Barbarian #45, 57 - 63, and 65 and uses the cover for Conan #57 as the paperback's cover. The cover art has been resized and shaped and features a box that says "First German publication!" The issue order is a little weird, but it at least makes sense that the paperback's cover is from one of the issues included inside (this will not always be the case). On the front inside cover is an ad for their Spider-Man reprints, known as Die Spinne in German, which is funny. The odd thing is that in skipping from issue #45 to #57, Conan is travelling with Tara and Yusef at the start of the second issue, and who those characters are or why Conan's with them will be completely lost on the reader. I get why they included #57: it's the prelude to "Queen of the Black Coast," which issue #58 really kicks off, but the lack of continuity is jarring.

Volume #15 features a list of issues that makes a lot more sense in that it's just issues 131 - 137 straight through and in order. The thing that doesn't make sense, though, is that the cover used for the paperback is Earl Norem's painted cover for Savage Sword #107! Not only is that not representative of the issues found within, it's an entirely different comic series! I'm left wondering if they were chosen by someone not that familiar with Conan. While much of the story arc contained here is "Queen of the Black Coast" and this cover features Conan on a pirate ship and there's a woman pirate there, it's clearly not Belit.

The same thing happens for Volume #16, which prints Conan #138 - 144, following chronologically from the previous volume, but uses Joe Jusko's cover for Savage Sword #65. These make no sense and seem to have been chosen for no reason other than the fact that they're cool covers. Once again, the art's been cropped, and you may notice that some aspect of each piece of art breaks the frame on all the covers.

If we actually move past the covers for a second, that Transformers wiki was right about some of the ugly choices. The text in word balloons and caption boxes is uglier, blockier text than American comics and sometimes leaves weird spaces due to text length differences.

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I speak a little German, but not enough to really read a comic all the way through, so these are mostly just fun curiosities for me. I wasn't able to find a ton about Condor's Conan Der Barbar online, so if you know of any databases that say which volumes reprinted which issues or anything like that, I'd love to see it.

Modern Graphics in Kreuzberg

That's me in Munich!