Savage Sword of Conan (2024) #1

 Savage Sword of Conan has a long and storied history among comics fans. It was the longest-running of Marvel's black-and-white magazine titles, featured thousands of pages of beautiful artwork, and is probably still the most faithful adaptation of Robert E. Howard's character into any medium. 

So Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics had some big boots to fill when they announced the return of the title. Happily, they've avoided most of the pitfalls and created a first issue that augers well for future installments. 

Here's what I liked, in no particular order: 

1. The price point of $6.99 is low enough to encourage the casual reader to give the book a try. 

2. Roy Thomas returns to write an introduction that discusses the aforementioned history of the book. Thomas also appears to be slated as the writer of some future issues, as well. Perfect! With the exception of REH himself, no other writer so gets Conan. 

3. The paper evokes pleasant memories of the golden age of newsprint comics. 

4. The stories themselves — a main Conan adventure, a Solomon Kane backup, and a Conan prose story — capture the essence of the characters quite well.

5. Nobody wants a PC barbarian, but writer John Arcudi gives us a Conan who respects women yet is still lusty. It's a middle ground that works well for the character. 

Here's what could be better: 

1. Max von Fafner's art, while in the main excellent, suffers from the decision (his or the editor's) to render the dinosaurs in some sort of ink/digital hybrid. Other commentators have noted that it took them right out of the story. While I won't go that far, the effect is jarring and probably would look much better in color. 

2. The reproduction on some pages is dark and muddy. I struggled to tell what was going on in some of the panels. Maybe it was just my copy. Again, if the intent was to print this on better paper or in color, the art would pop more. 

Other than these two concerns, it was a great first issue. I'll be back for more, by Crom! 

Tarzan: The New Adventures

 This beauty showed up on my doorstep earlier this week, and what a fun volume it is. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan: The New Adventures Volume 1 (Dark Horse) delivers exactly what the title promises — new stories of ERB's most famous creation, but definitely in the style of what has come before. 

The book offers the first two stories from the strip's continuity, previously available only to subscribers of ERB's website. Both are written by Roy Thomas, legendary scribe and editor for Marvel and DC Comics. The first story is illustrated by Thomas Grindberg, and the second by Benito Gallego. 

Since both are meant to replicate the charm of the full-color Sunday comics pages of yore, the pacing may surprise readers who expected a more traditional comic book. Most pages feature a succinct recap of what happened in the previous installment, a couple panels that advance the story incrementally, and a final panel with a cliffhanger or foreshadowing of the next chapter. 

Thomas does a good job of keeping the story rolling within these constraints, but I do wonder how readers found the pacing when seeing only one installment every week or even less frequently (Thomas notes in the intro that he and Grindberg struggled to keep to a schedule). 

The first story is a pretty typical lost-civilization plot that Tarzan has been involved in plenty of times in either the original novels or the many comics, movies, and TV shows that followed. Thomas gives Tarzan's mate, Jane, more to do than just getting kidnapped (a standard part of many Tarzan tales), although an abduction is central to this story, as well. 

Much of the first storyline appears to be checking off familiar beats of a Tarzan tale. Tantor the elephant? Check. Nkima the monkey? Check. Crocodiles, savage brutes, beautiful women pining away for the ape man from their thrones? Check, check, and check. 

And who can blame Thomas? Those are the aspects of ERB's storytelling that made Tarzan immensely popular in the pulps and continued to hold the character in good stead for most of the twentieth century. 

Grindberg lushly illustrates the proceedings in a style reminiscent of the great Tarzan artists of the past. The back cover of the book mentions Hal Foster, J. Allen St. John, Frank Frazetta, and John Buscema. Grindberg pays homage to all of them with expansive panels of jungle vegetation, the ruins of lost cities, and action action action. It's all intoxicating to experience. 

If the story gets a little cumbersome near the end with two lost civilizations, La of Opar, half-human brutes, and a Jane/Helen of Troy lookalike twist, it hardly matters because it's all so beautifully rendered and told with such sincerity.  

It's the second story where Thomas stretches creatively, giving readers a mash-up of Tarzan and the Leopard Men and Monster Men, the latter being a lesser-known ERB novel that does not feature Tarzan. Body horror and Tarzan don't generally mix, which is what makes this story fresher and more interesting than the first. 

Benito Gallego's artwork, while less flashy than Grindberg's, is nonetheless easier to follow in this format. His Tarzan owes a lot to the Buscema version from Marvel's 1970s series, but since that's one of the best of the comic-book Tarzans, it's fine. He does a good job of bringing to life the gorilleopard, the obligatory weird science experiment, which terrorizes the nearby village. 

Bonus points, too, for an unconventional ending that offers redemption and not just punishment. It was a surprise to read. 

A second volume of these website comics is scheduled for later this year. Based on how much I enjoyed this one, I look forward to more new tales starring everybody's favorite jungle lord.