Chronicles of Conan vol 1: Tower of the Elephant

By Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 1-59307-061-0

During the 1970’s the American comic book industry opened up after more than fifteen years of cautious and calcified publishing practises that had come about as a reaction to the censorious oversight of the self inflicted Comics Code Authority. This body was created to keep the publisher’s product wholesome after the industry suffered their very own McCarthy-style Witch-hunt during the 1950s.

One of the first genres to be revisited was Horror/Mystery comics and from that came the pulp masterpiece Conan the Cimmerian, via a little tale called ‘The Sword and the Sorcerers’ (from the horror anthology Chamber of Darkness #4) whose hero Starr the Slayer bore no little resemblance to the Barbarian. It was written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Barry Smith, a recent Marvel find, and one who was just breaking out of the company’s Kirby house-style.

Despite some early teething problems, including being cancelled and reinstated in the same month, the comic-strip adventures of Robert E. Howard’s were as big a success as the revived prose paperbacks that heralded a world boom in fantasy and the supernatural.

This volume collects the first eight landmark issues with a new, rich colouring make-over that does much to enhance Smith’s developing art style meaning work that was drawn for a much more primitive reproduction process is now full-bodied, substantial and lush.

Follow young Conan from the first meeting with a clairvoyant wizard who predicts his regal destiny (‘The Coming of Conan’), through slavery in ‘The Lair of the Beastmen’, experiencing a small Ragnarok in ‘The Twilight of the Grim Grey God’ before becoming a professional thief in ‘The Tower of the Elephant’. In issue #5 he met the haunting ‘Zukala’s Daughter’, then battled ‘Devil Wings over Shadizar’, escaped ‘The Lurker Within’ and finally ends this volume with ‘The Keepers of the Crypt’.

Thomas’s plan was to follow Conan’s career from all-but boyhood to his eventual crowning as King of Aquilonia, adding to and adapting the prose works of Howard and his posthumous collaborators on the way, and this agenda led to some of the best, freshest comics of the decade. The results of Barry (not-yet-Windsor) Smith’s search for his own graphic style, aided in these issues by inkers Dan Adkins, Sal Buscema, Frank Giacoia, Tom Palmer and Tom Sutton, led to acclaim and many awards for the creative duo.

Dark Horse hold the current license to produce Conan comics, and that same plan and those same canonical texts are being reinterpreted by a new generation of creators. But there’s room for both visions and these pure, honest, direct, beautiful tales have as much appeal and thrills plus a Universal Rating, meaning kids can read as safely as adults. So you all should.

©1970-1971, 2003 Conan Properties International, LLC. All Rights Reserved.