CONAN THE BARBARIAN: THE WITCH QUEEN OF ACHERON

I don't think I'm super picky when it comes to comic book art. I know folks for whom small variations in art can completely make or break a book: they'll buy one just for the art or they'll drop it just as quickly if it's not up to their standards. 

I have very few of those instances. It was a tragedy when Jerome Opeña got replaced on Uncanny X-Force after issue #18 and I dropped the book shortly after. I sometimes struggle to enjoy Simone Di Meo's work since it's just so busy. Conversely, I'll consider buying almost any book that Bruno Redondo, Jen Bartel, or Dan Mora works on. But most of the time, I don't mind if comic art just gets the job done.

Conan the Barbarian: The Witch Queen of Acheron makes me want to throw all that out a window.

The Witch Queen of Acheron is part of the Marvel Graphic Novel series which Marvel published from 1982 to 1983 and pulled from the whole stable of characters that Marvel had, including Conan, periodically. I covered the 1990 MGN release The Horn of Azoth a few months ago (It wasn't great!).

I picked up Witch Queen at FanExpo Denver last week at a pretty excellent booth. In pristine shape for $20! They had three different copies of Savage Sword #1, all of which were priced exactly at $100, so I didn't grab any of those (not on my public school teacher salary). Maybe one day! 

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L. Sprague de Camp has this line in The Spell of Conan about not wanting to spit in anyone else's soup, and I generally try to abide by that and write positively, but I don't think I can talk about The Witch Queen of Acheron without spitting in some soup. This graphic novel was written by Don Kraar, penciled by Gary Kwapisz, and inked by Art Nichols, and if you read my complete chronology of Savage Sword, you'll know that this isn't exactly the A-team. None of the Don Kraar-plotted issues are classics (though a few are good) and Gary Kwapisz's art never blew me away. I'm sorry to say that this 60-page story is not some of their best work.

In The Witch Queen of Acheron, Conan is at the end of a three-day bender in the Nemedian city Belverus, barely lucid, but still stalwart enough to take on a legion of Nemedian guards while half-crocked. He paid for his inn room and companions with ancient Acheronian gold pieces, which he was given by a dying man in the wilderness in exchange for burying his body. The local magistrates take notice, and Conan is goaded into helping them find where the Acheronian gold pieces came from. There's a pretty cool scene where the Nemedians threaten to dunk Conan in boiling oil, and a good time is had by all except the guy they test the oil temperature on.

The do eventually find the lost mines / sepulchers of Acheron, awaken some ancient evils, and fight some cultish zealots. The ending feels cribbed from Robert E. Howard's "The Dwellers Under the Tombs," but it's not terrible. As far as the story goes, I'm mostly just wondering why Marvel would choose to have MGN releases feature Conan when these super-sized comics are barely longer than a standard issue of Savage Sword. 

No, what really brings this thing down is the art. It's not good. The painted cover is gorgeous and I love that Conan is framed in that ring... great font choices too. But the interiors are rough.

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I said up top that I try not to be overly critical, and I mean it. But take a look at the set of panels above. These come from the beginning of the novel right as Conan is being confronted by the Nemedian guards. He makes the first move by smashing a wine bottle in one's face, but what kind of face is that? One my first pass, I thought it was Conan's, cracking open the bottle of wine and happily drinking from it before realizing it was a guard. The dude looks like he's smiling with his head thrown back, not getting clocked across the chin with a cabernet sauvignon. In the bottom panel, I think Conan has punched the other guard, but he also kind of looks like he's thrown him.

In this set, the whole crew is deep in the Acheronian crypt and about to unleash a curse. But what the hell has happened between the second and third panels? It took me a minute to realize that the scribe, Balmus, has been back-handed by Prince Tarascus, but the sequence is constructed so oddly. He looks well out of the prince's reach in the second panel, but by the third panel, he's been seemingly slapped and has fallen over. But he looks like the prince has launched him about eight feet with the force of his slap. The background characters are fully another color than Balmus in the foreground, which was probably just done to save time for the colorist, but makes them look really far away. I also really don't get the geography here. Balmus was opposite the stairs from the prince in the second panel, but is now falling down them? The casket in the second panel seems to be on the wrong side of the other characters as well.

There's just too much temporal space between the second panel and the third to hold them together, let alone make them flow well for a smooth reading experience.

Here's the last shoddily-constructed panel sequence I'll complain about. The woman, Demetzia, has died in Tarascus's arms. Since she was possessed by the titular witch queen of Acheron, this horrifying parasite thing hatches out of her, Alien-style, off-panel. But, like... from where? At first I thought it crawled out of the top of her skull or something based on the trail of blood. Tarascus was holding her face right by his and the explosion of gore up onto him looks like it's right in front of him. But since her head looks fine, I guess the monster had to come from her chest or something. So I don't get why the last panel is framed so far to the right of her body.

Kwapisz's faces are frequently lacking some detail and the motion is pretty stilted throughout, making me wish Marvel had enlisted another artist for this book, maybe pulling a team that didn't normally work on Conan titles already. When you have to stop multiple times during a story to re-read panels a handful of times just to make sure you know what's happening, that really kills the reading experience.

The art is far more egregious here than the story, but I did find it funny that they did the classic "read the evil spell out loud to activate the magic trap" move that they lampoon in the movie The Cabin in the Woods.

In terms of this story's chronology, it's hard to tell where to place it. Conan comes across as young and occasionally foolish, like with his ridiculous bender where he doesn't even realize one of the women he's sleeping with has been swapped out for another. But he is also far wiser than the miserly Prince Tarascus and clearly has experience commanding military units. I'm not exceedingly confident in this placement, but I think it fits in well right before "Xuthal of the Dusk," before Conan heads south on the map for a while. He's not too far from the area after "The Star of Khorala." It seems to work decently well with what Conan's up to in that period of his life.

I'm really hoping that some of the Marvel Graphic Novels are better than the first two I've picked up. I hope they take the opportunity to do something new with the format, style, or scope that is outside the purview of a potboiler issue of Conan, but it's not looking great so far.

★★☆☆​☆