Earlier this year, Marvel Comics announced that they had reacquired the rights to publish comics featuring Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. To most people this probably isn’t a big deal, but to me it is, and I’ll explain why in this week’s blog.
For those who don’t know, Conan was created by Robert E. Howard in 1932 and was featured for the first time in pulp magazine Weird Tales that same year. But perhaps the greatest succes the character had, was as a comic book hero in the 70’s and 80’s. Marvel acquired the rights to use Conan in 1970 and writer Roy Thomas’ run on the book was very succesful. At first with artist Barry Windsor Smith, but eventually with my personal favorite: the legendary John Buscema! I even have a John Buscema Conan tattooed on my leg, but more on my comic related tattoo’s in a future blog.
Of course Marvel has published a lot of books featuring licensed characters through the years, but none of those characters were actually part of Marvel’s “Earth-616 universe”, where most of their heroes live. Sure, there were crossovers with the likes of Godzilla or the Transformers, but in Conan’s case, his Hyborian Age was actually considered as part of Earth-616’s history. This became very clear during 1989’s Atlantis Attacks crossover, which featured most of Marvel’s popular superheroes, but also featured the elder god Set and the Serpent Crown, which we knew from Conan’s stories. Or the time that Conan villain, Kulan Gath, transformed Manhattan into a medieval world and battled the likes of Spider-Man, Dr. Strange and the X-Men.
But the most fun were probably the What If… issues featuring Conan, where he met popular Marvel heroes like Captain America, Thor and Wolverine. Marvel would never use other licensed characters in their What If… series and this once again proved that they considered Conan to be part of their universe. Conan was even featured on Marvel posters, calendars and other merchandise, next to their own superhero characters.
In 1991 I bougth a book called “Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics”, which pretty much told Marvel’s history. And in that book there is actually a couple of pages dedicated to Conan, with several quotes by Roy Thomas.
Unfortunately, Marvel lost the license in 2000. And they really hadn’t been using the character much in the years leading up to that. Those of you that were reading comics in the 90’s know that it was a very different time. The artwork was often over the top and the focus was on violent anti-heroes, mutants, cyborgs with huge guns and horror/occult themed characters. Apparently there was no more room for a sword wielding barbarian in a loincloth.
Luckily Dark Horse Comics acquired the license in 2003 and has been putting out awesome Conan books for the last 15 years. They took Conan back to his roots and had some great writers and artists on their titles. I was happy to see the character return to comics and have been reading Dark Horse’s Conan books ever since. And Dutch company Dark Dragon Books also started publishing the Dark Horse books in Dutch, in beautiful big hardcover editions. Things were going well for our favorite Cimmerian, but to me it felt kind of weird, because Conan wasn’t part of the Marvel Universe anymore….
And now apparently Marvel has the license again and will start publishing Conan comics in 2019. I expect them to keep the darker, more adult oriented theme going, that Dark Horse started, but I wonder if they’ll do crossovers with their own charcters. Or if they will once again acknowledge Conan’s place in the history of the Marvel Universe. The promotional art that they released (which you can see at the top of this entry) features Thor and Wolverine in the background, but I don’t know if this means that they’ll be doing crossovers or that it’s just symbolic. Personally I would love to see interaction between Conan and Marvel’s superheroes again, but I guess only time will tell.
To wrap things up, I would also like to address Red Sonja. Even though she was inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino, she was created by Roy Thomas as a supporting character in Marvel’s Conan comics. And like Conan, she also crossed over with Marvel characters like Spider-Man. But the license to publish Red Sonja comics is currently held by Dynamite Comics and they’ve been doing a great job at that. And they’ve done crossovers with the Dark Horse version of Conan, but will that still happen when Conan “moves” to Marvel? They did with Spider-Man in 2007, but that was before the Disney takeover. I would love to see Conan and Sonja team up again in a Marvel book, but I guess the chances of that happening are pretty small.
Well, I guess that wraps up this edition of my blog. As you can tell, I’m pretty excited about Conan’s move back to Marvel and now you know why. There were a lot of people talking about it on YouTube and podcasts, but nobody really mentioned Conan’s place in the history of the Marvel Universe. Like I said, they will begin publishing Conan comics in 2019. Luckily Dark Horse held on to the license long enough to do the crossover with DC’s Wonder Woman. I was at the comic book store today and ordered the hardcover collected edition. I really want to have that book, because that crossover is definitely not happening again after Conan moves to Marvel 😉
Comic Geek 76 - My Thoughts On Comics and Pop Culture 