![]() Look at the close-ups of Conan with so many individual follicles of hair illustrated and then compare it to a lot of art today where you might get a curl or two drawn in. Look at Conan in the wilderness as Smith painstakingly draws seemingly every blade of grass and every leaf on the trees and bushes. Jump ahead to the second story, and adaptation of Howard's Red Nails and just marvel at Smith’s detailed line work. But you can’t really hide behind technology when working in strict black and white. Today we see so many artists working in a minimalist, cartoony style because it can be digitally produced much quicker than hand drawn artwork. I have a theory about present day comic book art… Comic art APPEARS to be much better than it was say 20 or 30 years ago but this is due to advances in technology as far as printing, colorization, and digital enhancing. The story features some of the best art to grace the magazine by Barry Smith. Still a teenager, he encounters a beautiful woman in the frozen north who leads him into an ambush by her giant brothers. This is one of Conan’s earliest tales chronologically. Howard’s shortest, but most well known Conan tales, The Frost Giant’s Daughter. The volume leads off with one of Robert E. From a purely artistic standpoint, Savage Sword and Savage Tales were dwarfing just about anything else going on in comics at that time. These are truly legendary names: Barry Windsor Smith, Neal Adams, Jim Starlin, Mike Kaluta, Frank Brunner, John Buscema, Boris Vallejo, Esteban Maroto, Alex Nino, and Tim Conrad. What immediately strikes you about the book is the incredible roster of artists. With this volume we are seeing these stories again for the first time in over 30 years. ![]() These first five issues pre-dated Savage Sword and within a few years had already escalated in price beyond my pocket change. ![]() Back in the day as a young Conan fan, Savage Tales was like the Holy Grail. This volume one Omnibus edition features 544 pages and includes the Conan stories from Savage Tales # 1 – 5, and Savage Sword of Conan # 1 – 10. Overall any fan of sword and sorcery comics should read this volume as it represents some of the best work of the genre.ĭark Horse has been reprinting Marvel Comics’ color Conan comics for a few years but now they are adding the Conan stories from the black & white Savage Sword of Conan Magazine. The art was about as perfect as possible for the stories, really capturing the gritty essence of these barbaric tales. Which makes sense, given that's where Conan got his start and many of the stories adapted were taken right from Robert E. These weren't "dumbed down" at all, and read more akin to a pulp magazine of the 1930s rather than a comic book. These were adult tales of adventure, with sometimes thick prose. It wasn't just the suggestive nudity and the sometimes graphic violence, but the stories themselves were just more mature than it's four color counterparts. This was to denote it's more mature subject matter, and while it's not exactly "Adults Only" it is definitely aimed at an adult audience. This series was in black and white, and also magazine sized rather than comic sized. I was too young to read these when they first came out, but I do remember reading this comic magazine series in the 80s.
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