Roy Thomas's CONAN THE BARBARIAN: A Retrospective of Early History and Chronology

In an alternate universe, Roy Thomas and Marvel Comics acquired the rights to Lin Carter's hero Thongor, leading to the long-running comic Thongor the Barbarian, The Savage Sword of Thongor, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's star turn was as the big-screen Thongor. Maybe you're even tuning into Late Night with Thongor O'Brien. Or perhaps not (especially not that last one), since Thongor's not near as cool as Conan.

But that was the goal at one point. In 1970, Stan Lee was looking for a sword-and-sorcery characters to acquire the rights to for Marvel Comics, and he called Roy Thomas into his office. Thomas listed off the pulp heroes he was aware of: Thongor, Kull, Conan, John Carter. Roy was passingly familiar with Conan, having bought a copy of Conan the Adventurer for the Frank Frazetta cover and was sort of nonplussed by "The People of the Black Circle." He'd eventually picked up a few more of the Lancer / Ace series for the Frazetta covers and liked a few of the stories within.

Stan Lee was hoping to get the rights to Thongor. Stan, ever the salesman, thought the name looked better on a cover than a name like "Conan" that started with a C. I don't get why, but it led to Roy Thomas making an offer to adapt Thongor stories into Marvel books. Ultimately, the Lin Carter camp wanted too much for the rights and Marvel wasn't willing to pony up, so Thomas looked elsewhere. He ultimately wrote to Glenn Lord: Howard's estate executor and one of Conan's champions, offering $200 per issue ($50 more than Stan had allowed him to offer). Thankfully, Lord accepted and Thomas teamed with rookie artist Barry Windsor-Smith (at that point lacking the "Windsor") to adapt Conan.

Side bar: if you've never read Barry Windsor-Smith's Monsters, get a copy now. It's a rejected Hulk story from the 80s, and one of the most deeply affecting comics I've ever read.

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Roy Thomas circa 1970

To kind of approximate a costume like superhero comic readers probably would have been expecting, they gave young Conan a helmet with horns adorning the front and a necklace of three red pendants around his neck. Other than that, it was just a loincloth.

Now, Roy and Barry didn't actually have the rights to any original Robert E. Howard material at first, and though that would soon change, it meant that the Conan the Barbarian comic for Marvel wouldn't be anything like straight adaptions of the character's stories. Unlike the original Howard stories, the Lancer books, or the eventual Savage Sword of Conan, this comic would be linear in narrative. With so much Conan stuff inherently appearing out of order, this feels like a deliberate choice now, but looking back, it was probably just the obvious move. Comic readers were used to Amazing Spider-Man #35 carrying on the story from Amazing Spider-Man #34, after all.

This leads me to the chronology of Roy and Barry's Conan. I picked up the Titan Comics omnibus of the first 26 issues and was very interested in how it both mirrors and diverges from the usually-accepted chronology of Conan's life. In some places, it is remarkably similar, or even expands beautifully on throwaway lines from Howard's original stories. In other parts, it changes large aspects of Conan's history, while still sort of rhyming with the prose work, some parts of which hadn't even been written yet. I think this was on purpose. Roy Thomas is very well-versed in Conan chronologies and has said in his essays looking back on Conan the Barbarian that while he couldn't just adapt existing Conan stories, he wanted to generally follow and honor the timeline organized by past chronologizers like P. Schuyler Miller and L. Sprague de Camp.

Below, I compare many of the story beats we see in those first 26 issues. Arrows between issues that are red represent direct adaptions, while arrows that are in blue represent stories that rhyme with, seem to be inspired by, or in other ways mirror Conan's prose short stories.

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From the north came Conan

Conan's life begins in Cimmeria, being born on a battlefield. This is one of the indisputable aspects of Conan's life, though it's not shown in the Conan the Barbarian comic (which I'm going to abbreviate as "CtB" from here on). Whereas the prose stories frequently mention the Cimmerian raid on Aquilonia's Venarium fort, we don't see this is CtB. Instead, we skip to Vanaheim, where Conan is already raiding with those mentioned in "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." Conan is 17, but of course, already a great fighter.

In Conan's prose adventures, he raids with the Aesir, which takes him to the castle of Haloga in Hyperborea. He's enslaved by the Hyperboreans, eventually escaping and fleeing south into the Brythunian mountains. His inquisitor is the witch queen Vammatar, who controls undead hordes.

In the CtB comic, we get a progression where the details are entirely different but the broad strokes are ultimately the same. Roy Thomas wanted to waste little time getting Conan down into the "gleaming cities" of the Hyborian kingdoms, while also starting in the north like "Frost-Giant." Conan still gets enslaved in Hyperborea, but with some futuristic societies, under very different circumstances. Conan's inquisitor this time is a leader of subhuman "Beast Men" named Moira.

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As Conan flees south from Hyperborea, in the third issue we get a digression from the prose stories entirely in the form of "The Twilight of the Grim Grey God," which is a really stellar issue. It has no prose equivalent in Conan's journey. There's a novel by Sean A. Moore with a similar title: Conan and the Grim Grey God, but the two seem to have entirely different plots. What Thomas was doing here was pulling a play from L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's playbook: those two authors had been adapting non-Conan REH material into Conan stories since the mid-50s, so Thomas looked to the Conanless Howard historical tale "The Grey God Passes," AKA "The Twilight of the Grey Gods," AKA "Spears of Clontarf."

Honestly, the first two issues of CtB ​aren't that great; I think Roy was finding his footing. Roy has said he agrees. While reading those first two stories, I was a little worried I had made a mistake ponying up the whopping $125 pricetag for the omnibus, but my fears were soon assuaged. The third rebounds hard and it's a compelling, original story. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," while not adapted yet, will appear later on.

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A thief in the night

As I noted above, Marvel Comics didn't have the rights to adapt any actual Robert E. Howard Conan stories when they acquired the rights to the Cimmerian initially, but after Roy Thomas was able to convince both Glenn Lord and the Marvel execs to pony up for the rights to other REH work, it wouldn't take long for Roy to seek out the rights to his favorite Conan story, "The Tower of the Elephant." It's the only Conan story that Thomas adapted three different times: once in Conan the Barbarian in 1971, again in Savage Sword of Conan in 1977, and also in the Conan the Barbarian newspaper strip that ran from 1978 to 81.

In the traditionally-accepted prose progression, Conan comes down from the north into the thief city of Zamora, where his first adventure is chronicled in "The Tower of the Elephant." It makes me happy to know that Roy Thomas agrees that the thief city is unnamed and is not Arenjun, as so many authors have conflated. Conan's first thief story being "Tower" contradicts the chronology I settled on, but I don't want to complicate things too much here, so ignore me for a bit. In the Howard stories, Conan follows "Tower" with thieving in Shadizar the Wicked in "The Hall of the Dead," then going over to Nemedia in "The God in the Bowl," and finally to an unnamed city-state in Corinthia for "Rogues in the House."

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In the CtB comic, Conan begins his thieving journey in Zamora just like he does in Howard's stories. Thomas's adaption of "Tower" is very faithful. Where he goes from there is more interesting, though.

Conan leaves Zamora's Thief-City pretty quickly (at least compared to how much time he seems to have spent there in Savage Sword) and we see him next in a remote Zamorian village for issue 5, "Zukala's Daughter." Issue 5 was actually planned by Thomas and Smith prior to nabbing "The Tower of the Elephant," so it was the original issue 3 for the book. I don't think it's a great issue, unfortunately. Inspired by the REH poem "Zukala's Daughter" and pulling from other inspirational sources Roy Thomas can't quite remember, it's a one-and-done story that doesn't have any kind of equivalent in short story form. 

Conan then goes to Shadizar, which Roy Thomas was very excited about when writing. While Zamora is pretty well-defined in "Tower of the Elephant," Thomas was able to mold Shadizar much more to how he saw it seeing as its only appearance was in "The Hall of the Dead." We get a few issues there: the mediocre issue 6 in "Devil-Wings Over Shadizar" and then "The Lurker Within" for issue 7, which is their adaption of "The God in the Bowl." Roy made a few changes to "The Lurker Within" like changing a few names around and adding one female character that isn't in the original story, but even kept some of de Camp's lines he didn't love just so that he wouldn't deviate too much from the original. Issue 7 is a huge step up over the previous issues and, by my estimation, where the comic really finds its footing. Roy felt the same in hindsight and expressed a lot of pride in this issue. There are very few duds for the next twenty issues! 

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Issue 8 takes Conan to a moonlight city named Lanjau (rather than Larsha in the REH/dC version). The plot beats are quite similar, but the monsters are frankly cooler in Thomas's version, and it includes an Gunderman named Burgun who mirrors the Gunderman Nestor of the prose version, but only slightly. Roy didn't want to simply adapt de Camp's version of "The Hall of the Dead," so he took some liberties with his storytelling. For example, he adds some very cool armor to the undead sentries in the titular hall since he didn't feel like they were described in much detail and decides to reuse Burgun later on. Roy Thomas notes that issues 2-7 each saw declines in sales from the previous issue, leading to Stan Lee preparing to cancel the book. But 8 was where things started to change. It was the first book to sell better than the previous issue, and the title began an upward climb from there. For the next twenty years, he says, CtB was never on the chopping block again.

Issue 9, "The Garden of Fear," is an original creation for which there's no prose equivalent.

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Rogues in the temple, and then in the house

CtB issues 10 and 11 are something really special. Marvel was implementing a change in which they would expand their output from 15-cent, 32-page books to 25-cent, 48-page books, which was something DC was doing at the time, too. As such, Thomas and Smith suddenly had a few more pages to play with in issues 10 and 11.

Issue 10, "Beware the Wrath of Anu," seems wholly original for a while (the cover even promises "ALL NEW STORIES" somewhat deceptively). Conan is in an unnamed Corinthian city-state and happens to meet back up with the unnamed Gunderman from issue 7, named Burgun instead of Nestor. As Conan, Burgun, and an original character named Jenna burgle at temple to a bull god, all kinds of strange, cosmic shit happens. But the end of the issue reveals something: this is all lead-in to "Rogues in the House," which the comic adapts in issue 11. Roy Thomas masterfully expands on all kinds of throw-away lines and setup from the prose story to create an excellent prelude that is both wickedly entertaining and fills in all kinds of gaps. You know how they wrote that whole Solo movie around the throwaway line about how the Millennium Falcon could do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs? This is what they wish they were doing over at LucasFilm.

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Conan gets thrown in jail (as he appears at the beginning of "Rogues") due to their thieving activities in issue 10. It's revealed that the woman he seeks revenge on is actually Jenna, whose role is massively expanded form the short story. It's at this point where the CtB "Rogues" meets up with the prose version and follows REH's pretty closely, albeit with a much more purely simian Thak that I originally ever pictured.

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From the letters pages

Now that CtB's thief stories were completed with "Rogues in the House," which Roy Thomas rightly deemed to be a high point of comics in the 1970s, the REH canon joins Conan up with the Turanians, but we don't get that yet in CtB. Instead, there's a wholly original digression for a few issues, followed by an old stand-by re-ordered in the chronology.

Remember how Marvel had inflated the page count of their books for CtB 10 and 11? It was almost immediately rescinded, bringing Roy and Barry's page requirements back down into the twenties. Pushed by a close deadline, the decided to use a story they had written for Savage Tales #2 which had been cancelled, leaving the story unpublished. This became CtB's 12th issue, "The Dweller in the Dark," for which there's no analogue in prose. 

Even more out of the box, though, is what they did next. Roy Thomas notes in an essay that when he was writing CtB, the sum total of authors who had published anything Conan-based was limited to himself, Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg. He thought he might give someone else a shot.

​Opening up their bullpen to Conan pitches, issue 13 came from sword & sorcery writer John Jakes and resulted in "The Web of the Spider-God." Like the whole Grim Grey God situation detailed above, there's a Conan and the Spider God novel by de Camp that is entirely unrelated.

Their next pitch came from British author Michael Moorcock, incorporating his character Elric of Melniboné, who is not nearly as dorky as he first seems. Issues 13 and 14 are a cosmic-as-fuck two-parter featuring Elric, and I enjoyed them way more than the covers made me think I would. Especially their last pages, for which the art is a serious show-stopper. These stories, with no traditional prose companions, take Conan south to the land of Koth much sooner than the short stories do. They've also caused me to look into Elric stories, which seem to be pretty awesome so far. 

After that, once again likely spurred on by tight deadlines, Roy and Barry reprinted their adaption of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" from Savage Tales as issue 15. This doesn't line up with where I put "Frost-Giant" in my chronology, or in the other popular placement after Conan's Turanian mercenary days, but it certainly seems like it landed here in CtB out of necessity, rather than as part of a grand plan. Additionally, the torch was passed by this point to Gil Kane as the lead illustrator, who I noted in my post about the first 100 issues of Savage Sword just... doesn't draw Conan to my liking. Barry will be back before too long.

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Go east, young man

If one is following the original REH canon, Howard sends Conan east after his thieving days so that he can join the army of Turan as a mercenary in the service of King Yildiz. I noted when reading through my chronology that this was one of the least-inspiring episodes of Conan's long career, and I've seen others chime in to that effect as well. However, it's kind of an important one: it's where Conan evidently learns to use a bow, to refine his horseman skills, and gains travel experience.

Many note that Conan's physical description in his thief days keep him in sandals and a loin cloth, but Conan dons armors, helmets, and notably a scarlet cloak at the end of "The Hand of Nergal" that we'll see again in "Queen of the Black Coast," linking those two stories chronologically. If we're talking minutia, there's also the fact that "Nergal" mentions that Conan's horse was given to him by Murilo in "Rogues in the House," which implies that "Rogues" was shortly before "Nergal," it it's clear CtB isn't playing that same game.

In Howard' chronology, Conan's Turanian days are limited to the single unfinished story "The Hand of Nergal." de Camp and Carter expanded that to six stories, though really only two of them have Conan completing a military mission given to him by King Yildiz. This is the biggest change for CtB so far, I'd say. For the next long stretch of issues, Conan is sent east, joining the Turanians, and having adventures with light connections to the Howard / de Camp / Carter stories.

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Issues 17 and 18 adapt the Conanless Howard story "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth," incorporating Conan into the narrative and introducing a character named Fafnir, who becomes a bit of a partner for Conan for several issues. Roy Thomas didn't even expect for Fafnir to appear after that two-part story, but Fafnir grows into an excellent character over the course of several issues together with Conan. The end of issue 18 explicitly shows Conan and Fafnir ending up on a Turanian war galley the Vilayet Sea being hired into the service of Prince Yezdigerd of Turan, therefore exploring part of his Turanian days unseen in Howard's work. 

Though I'm not the biggest fan of Conan's Turanian days in short story form, many of the issues from 17 to 26 are excellent comics. While issue 19 mostly confines the action to one Turanian ship, it's a great adventure. It feels a little similar to "The Hand of Nergal" to me, but CtB will eventually adapt "Nergal" itself.

Issue 20 puts Conan at odds with the Turanian government and (sort of) has him resigning his commission from the country, dramatically leaping off the ship.

Issue 21 puts Conan far to the east, and while it isn't a direct adaption of "The Curse of the Monolith," it rhymes with many elements of that story. Conan is tricked into going to the monolith by a priest, he's strapped to it, and there's a creature who wants to consume him that descends from the top of the monolith.

The next few issues, up to the end of the first volume of The Original Marvel Years' first omnibus, have Conan floating around Hyrkania, Turan, and Khitai. Surprisingly, it has Conan spend what I felt was a huge stretch of time in the Turanian city of Makkalet, meeting Red Sonja and folding other non-Conan stories into the mix. Issue 22 is a reprint and therefore I won't include it here. Issue 23 is freely adapted from "The Shadow of the Vulture," and 25 is "inspired in part" by "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune," both originally lacking Conan (but the second is a Kull story, so that's close!).

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Freely adapted

After issue 24, Barry Windsor-Smith left the book for good. When Stan Lee asked Roy Thomas what he thought would happen to the book, he said that they would sell more comic books, but win fewer awards. At the end of issue 26, it seems like Conan is going to drift back west.

​I can't wait to pick up the next volume of this series, which should hit shelves in just a few weeks. It's so interesting to me how Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Gil Kane were able to weave elements into their Conan canon in a way that freely adapted and rhymed with other parts of the Conan universe, while also feeling adventurously original.