CONAN THE BARBARIAN #25 is a must-read

I don't really do a lot of what I think of as "reviews" on this blog. I know a lot of times my writing about Conan stuff verges into review territory, but I usually think of them as essays. I try to come up with an interesting take, something to actually say about the story and engage with its themes. I try to place them in chronology. And yeah, I usually include how good I felt the story is, but my goal isn't really to review.

Especially not contemporary stuff- I feel like I would lose interest profoundly fast if I had to come up with a unique angle on everything, especially just a 24-page comic each month. Sounds like a grind. And if I ever fall into the pattern of just summarizing a plot and then telling you what I liked and disliked? Take me out back behind the barn and shoot me.

But Jim Zub and Alex Horley's Conan the Barbarian #25, which came out today? Brother, I had to rush to my keyboard so I could tell you about this thing.

---

Most discussions of this book are starting with its unique art, understandably so. Each panel is a hand-done oil painting by longtime Titan Conan artist Alex Horley. They are universally gorgeous. Oil paints present such a different feeling than traditional comic book art. For one, it's a single artist working all the way through rather than a collaboration of a penciller, inker, colorist, and letterer. They lack the traditional outlines and blacks of de rigeuer comic book creation. They feel so tactile; in the two-page spread with the title, you can literally see the texture of the canvas under Horley's work. His deep blues, unearthly greens, and vivid reds seem to glow on the page, like the creepy, yellow eyes of the the comic's title character, "the Nomad."

I don't mean to imply that comics are a "low" art or anything (I adore them!), but there's something incredible about seeing comic art rendered as a painting. I had this Alex Ross painting of Plastic Man framed as a poster on my wall when I was like 13, and I think it was because of this hard-to-name feeling that painted comic books instill in me. It elevates everything.

I'm not usually a variant cover guy (you ever feel like comic companies are trying to scam you out of another four dollars with them?), but I had to pick up a few here. I grabbed the standard A cover, the Roberto De La Torre "Frost-Giant's Daughter" cover, and the black-and-white De La Torre sketch version too.

---

As much as Horley's art is going to be the hook that draws a lot of people to this issue, I don't want the spotlight to avoid Jim Zub's writing here. He's been fantastic for the last two years on both Conan and Savage Sword, but this story feels like a victory lap. 

Surprisingly, it's Zub's first King Conan story for Titan, which surprised me. Folks like Jason Aaron wrote the great "Ensorcelled" two-parter for SSOC, and I know that Jim tends to write younger Conan a little more often, but I guess I never realized he had never actually penned a King Conan yarn. With as many times as I've heard Jim in interviews and podcasts refer to the very first moment of Conan's literary existence- filling in lost corners of maps in a library in the towers of his Aquilonian castle, I guess I'd just assumed that of course he'd written an elder Conan tale.

As the gorgeous wraparound cover implies, Conan revisits many portions of his life in this issue, sprinting us through a greatest hits (and greatest stabbings and greatest crucifixions) of Conan's life. In the end, it becomes not only a celebration of what the current Conan creative team have done for the last two years, but a celebration of what keeps bringing us back to this Depression-era barbarian for a hundred years, and even of storytelling itself. Jim has some great, poignant lines in here like calling Conan the "philosopher barbarian." I have no such banger lines. Suffice it to say: this shit rocks.

Jeff Shanks's essay in the back goes down as a fitting desert to this celebration of Conan, stories, and the way they're told. I love the way Jeff is able to communicate his passion for the world of the Hyborian Age.

If this were the last Conan issue from Jim Zub and Titan, it would be a fitting way to go out. But I'm so glad it's not. Pick it up now!